Associated Press / Naomi Koppel
GENEVA (AP) -- Rich and poor nations, replowing the same territory they did at last year's, riot-torn Seattle trade conference, tried Tuesday to hammer out a United Nations plan to tackle global poverty.
"A major political struggle is going on here," said John Langmore, head of the United Nations division of social policy and development. "There are powerful differences of position and of interests."
A special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly here is looking at progress since a summit on poverty in Copenhagen five years ago. Governments and U.N. officials concede that little has changed, and in some places the situation has actually worsened.
"The poor are subject to daily humiliation, abuse, rejection, exclusion and harassment," said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
"The poorest feel the unrelenting agony of chronic hunger, the suffering of untreated disease and the exposure of inadequate shelter."
Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi, prime minister of Mozambique, said: "Our people -- with reason -- doubt our seriousness when the decisions we have made as governments do not bring direct and tangible impact on the quality of their lives."
Governments are trying to agree on a statement of targets for the eradication of poverty over the next years, with the aim of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.
But as at the World Trade Organization meeting in November, the poor and rich nations differ over labor standards, market access, the environment and debt relief.
Developing countries want to see the industrialized world writing off more debt for the poorest nations while opening markets to imports in areas like agriculture.
They are also concerned that richer countries are failing in the commitments they made to provide aid to poorer countries. Only four nations are meeting the promise they made to the United Nations to provide 0.7 percent of gross national product in Official Development Assistance.
Rich nations claim that many of the world's poor countries have done little to help themselves by tackling corruption or drafting national plans to pinpoint and eradicate poverty.
They also believe that development issues should be linked to an improvement in human rights -- particularly in rights for workers.
"Some say that implementing labor rights holds back development," said Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. "I say it is the other way around. Fundamental workers' rights sustain development and foster democracy."
Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development Fund, said he thought all sides needed to look at what they had done since Copenhagen.
"There is no monopoly of right or wrong on this," Malloch Brown told The Associated Press.
An estimated 4,600 delegates are attending the assembly, which runs until Friday.
On the Net: http://www.un.org/socialsummit:
