U.N. Receives New Pledges of Aid Totaling $16 Billion

from the New York Times

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

UNITED NATIONS — Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, announced on Thursday that the organization had received an additional $16 billion in pledges to fight a host of global ills like hunger and malaria, calling it an important signal that the world financial crisis would not impair aid efforts.

“That expression of the global commitment is all the more remarkable because it comes against the background of a global crisis,” Mr. Ban said at a news conference.

But his optimism was not shared universally, with some other senior officials suggesting that the ripple effects from the credit crisis would eventually force governments to cut back the amount of money they actually donate.

The new pledges emerged from a special series of meetings attended by 96 heads of state or heads of government, which were held on the sidelines of the annual General Assembly, all focused on a series of eight development goals. They included $4.5 billion for education, $3 billion to combat malaria and $1.75 billion in aid to prevent starvation in the Horn of Africa.

Some of the bigger donations came from oil powers. Norway pledged $1 billion over 10 years to reduce child and infant mortality, while Saudi Arabia committed $500 million toward enrolling an additional 24 million children in primary school by 2010.

China offered to provide a battery of programs to improve agricultural yields, health care and education, as well as to promote clean energy in Africa. On the extended list of new pledges released by the United Nations, the only donation listed from the United States was $61 million over five years to help African farmers get better seeds.

A spokesman for the United States Mission to the United Nations said it was checking the figure, which was released late on Thursday.

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister who shared the podium with Mr. Ban at the news conference, said an economic crisis was precisely the wrong time to reduce development aid. Given the rising cost of food, fertilizer and fuel, for example, it was more important than ever to help African farmers improve their yields, he said.

But other officials said people expecting the latest commitments to be met were kidding themselves because the financial crisis was likely to cause Western governments to cut their budgets. “Promising to get people more money for development?” Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said during a breakfast with reporters on Thursday. “This is not true. We are lying.”

The Group of 8 industrialized nations pledged in 2005 to donate more than $25 billion to Africa by 2010, but figures released by the United Nations this month showed that only $4 billion had actually been provided.

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