New statistics from the UN

The United Nations has a new report out today that says that pledges in aid from the G-8 have not been fulfilled. The report from the Millennium Development Goal task force was put together for the General Assembly. The task force also says that there are now 1.3 billion people around the world below the poverty line.

We go to two different sources for this post as each story covers different aspects of the report. First, from this IRIN story that we found in Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the unfulfilled pledges.

The report, Strengthening the Global Partnership for Development in a Time of Crisis, by the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Gap Task Force, highlighted an annual gap of US$35 billion in the 2005 pledge made by the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries at a summit in Gleneagles, United Kingdom.

This amount includes a $20 billion annual shortfall in its commitments to Africa, even though 2008 saw the highest levels of development assistance to the continent.

In a preface to the report UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recognized that since the adoption of the MDGs in 2000 there had been "great progress" in reducing poverty and hunger, and promoting access to education and health services.

This New York Times story that we found at the Dallas Morning News has stats on the global recession's impact on the poor.

Other grim statistics:

• As many as 222 million workers run the risk of joining the ranks of the working poor.

• Remittance flows, which reached $328 billion in 2008, will drop by 7.3 percent in 2009, the World Bank says.

• Hunger rates are up in every region in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.