The United Nations said Thursday that rich countries are lagging behind in fulfilling their commitments to providing aid to developing countries.
In a report released Thursday at the UN Headquarters, the world body said donors will need to increase their development assistance by 18 billion U.S. dollars a year between now and 2010 so as to meet their pledges made in 2005.
Even so, total aid will be expected to account for 0.35 percent of gross national income of rich countries, still only halfway to the UN target of 0.7 percent, according to the report, entitled Delivering on the Global Partnership for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
At the 2005 Group of Eight Summit in Gleneagles, donor countries promised to increase the total flow of official development assistance (ODA) by 50 billion U.S. dollars per year by 2010.
The report was prepared by the MDG Gap Task Force, created by UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon to track international commitments on aid, trade and debt, and to follow progress on access to essential medicines and technology.
"The year 2008 should mark a turning point in progress towards the Millennium Development Goals," Ban said at the launch of the report. "This report is a wake-up call."
"It provides a valuable snapshot of where the global community is on track in fulfilling its commitments, and where we need to strengthen our efforts for the second half of the MDG timetable," he said.
Though donor countries have stepped up official development assistance since 2000, aid flows have actually declined in recent years - by 4.7 percent in 2006 and a further 8.4 percent in 2007, the report said.
The report described the breakdown of the Doha development round of trade negotiations in July as "a major setback for developing countries seeking to benefit from expanding global trade opportunities in order to reduce poverty."
The Doha round was launched in 2001 with the broad purpose of fulfilling the Millennium Declaration objective of establishing an "open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory multilateral trading and financial system."
According to the report, only 79 percent of exports from least developed countries are given duty-free access to the markets of developed countries, well short of the target set in 2005 of 97 percent.
Another major Doha stumbling block was agricultural subsidies, which stood at 363 billion U.S. dollars in 2006 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, almost four times the level of ODA that year, the report said.
The United Nations is hosting a high-level event in New York on September 25, at which world leaders will take stock of MDG progress so far and discuss further moves to boost its implementation.
Source:Xinhua
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