[United Nations] Poverty’s harsh realities requires new int’l efforts, Vatican nuncio

from catholic online

By Mark Lombard

The international community needs to do more to eradicate extreme poverty throughout the globe, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations told the world body.

“The harsh reality of poverty today requires renewed efforts by the international community,” said Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Vatican nuncio to the United Nations, to the Feb. 9 session of the Commission for Social Development of the U.N. Economic and Social Council.

The commission held its 44th session to review the progress report on the results of the first U.N. Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.

During his remarks, pointed to

Archbishop Migliore said that “a three-pronged agenda is needed for developing countries: to improve the terms of trade; to double aid assistance; and to provide further debt relief.”

While noting that the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has almost halved in the 20 years – from 40 percent to 21 percent – from 1981 to 2001, he said that “still leaves far too many countries and peoples living with high levels of poverty.”

“The progress of poverty reduction,” he stressed, “is falling short of what is needed, especially in the poorest countries.”

The “global picture is mixed” concerning poverty reduction, the archbishop noted, with the encouragement seen in “several Asian countries” being weighed against sub-Saharan Africa “having made little or no progress during the 1990s.” He added that the number of Africans living on less than $1 a day nearly doubled since 1980 to 315 million.

Sustainable economic growth “in which the poor share equitably in the benefits” must be included if “rapid poverty reduction” is to take place, the nuncio said. As a result, he added, “developing countries’ leaders need to be encouraged and assisted in the pursuit of policies that will enable their countries to attain much higher economic growth rates than so far achieved since 2000.”

Archbishop Migliore pointed to the connection between “inequalities within and between societies” and poverty eradication, noting that income differences may contribute to the flight of skilled and unskilled labor from developing countries.

“Poverty eradication and a more even social development will necessarily include the means to attract and retain labor of every kind,” he said.

He called on the international community “to build up the needed capacity and to enable the effective implementation of public investment programs critical” to meeting the U.N. poverty goals.

Monitoring should be done on a more frequent annual basis, the archbishop urged, if the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty in the world’s poorest countries by one half in 2015 are going to be realized.

In 2000, 189 U.N. member nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals to cut global poverty in half by 2015. To achieve these goals, developed countries are supposed to increase development aid to 0.7 percent of their gross national product.