Aid agency angry as poverty ignored

from The Sydney Morning Herald

Paul Bibby

ONE OF Australia's leading aid organisations has criticised the Federal Government for failing to put poverty on the agenda at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.

But the Prime Minister, John Howard, yesterday released a report suggesting growth in emerging economies is lifting people from poverty and leading to the rise of a new global middle class.

The head of the Catholic aid agency Caritas Australia, Jack de Groot, said yesterday that the organisation was disappointed that the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty in the Asia-Pacific region would not rate a mention during the forum. "There are more than 700 million people in our region living on less than $1 a day and the leaders of some of those countries are attending this forum," Mr de Groot said.

"APEC offers an excellent opportunity to agree on multilateral trade policies to ease the burden on those countries and to get real commitments. The United Nations Millennium Development goals have played a major role at multilateral meetings such as the G8, WTO and the World Bank, and I am mystified as to why the Prime Minister has not done more to put them on the agenda here given his recent comments on the issue."

Mr Howard, and the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, have referred in recent days to the positive contribution made by APEC in alleviating poverty.

However, the Asia-Pacific region is likely to achieve just two of the 18 targets set by the Millennium Development Goals, a recent UN report says.

"Development has actually gone backwards in a number of the categories such as gender equality, reducing child mortality and education," Mr de Groot said.

The report Mr Howard released yesterday, by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, says the most rapid increase in the new consumer class will take place in emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific. It shows the number of people in absolute poverty in east Asia and the Pacific fell from almost 500 million in 1990 to 200 million in 2003. It is estimated it could fall to 20 million by 2030.

"They are quite astonishing figures," Mr Howard said. "They underline the enormous value of globalisation and the importance of continued economic growth. They also underline the uninformed pigheadedness of those who demonstrate against APEC in the name of helping the poor and the dispossessed.

The co-ordinator of the Homeless Persons Legal Service, Elisabeth Baraka, said she was concerned homeless people with mental health problems may be unnerved by the police presence in the city. "We have homeless people walking along the street doing nothing who are being asked for their ID by the police, but most homeless people don't have any ID," Ms Baraka said said.