France steps up pledge to battle poverty

September 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS

The 10-year-old promise to lift the world’s poorest is unfulfilled, and with world economies clawing back from the worst recession since World War II, the French president and others implored leaders Monday not to return to their “old bad habits” of ignoring global poverty.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French leader, was the first to accept U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s challenge for nations to deliver more resources to combat global poverty, ignorance and misery. He pledged to boost France’s annual $10 billion contribution to the world’s poorest people by 20 percent over the next three years. He urged other leaders to join him.

“We have no right to do less than what we have decided to do,” Sarkozy told more than 140 presidents, premiers, princes and a king at the opening of the three-day U.N. Millennium Development Goals summit. “Let us not fall back into our old bad habits.”

Sarkozy spoke as U.N. member states began their accounting of progress in the decade since promising to end global poverty. Developed nations have fallen well short in keeping pace with a final goal set for 2015. The U.N. acknowledges that even if the main target of reducing extreme poverty by half is achieved in the next five years, nearly 1 billion people still will be living on less than $1.25 a day.

Sarkozy proposed that the world body create a small international tax on financial transactions to fund development aimed at ending poverty and meeting other millennium goals. He said developed nations had a moral obligation to poorer ones.

Developed countries must make a special effort in Africa, he said. Too many people there still die of preventable illnesses such as malaria.