World leaders have a last chance to fulfil promises to reduce poverty and boost health by 2015 or risk being damned by history for condemning millions of children to death, a UN report said on Wednesday.
The warning was issued a week before heads of state and government from 175 countries gather in New York to gauge progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goals in the face of attempts by the United States to declare them null and void.
"If this summit fails, there really is no way back," said Kevin Watkins, lead author of the UN's Human Development Report.
World leaders agreed in 2000 on a series of goals to be reached by 2015, including halving the number of people living in extreme poverty, cutting deaths of children under five by two-thirds and achieving universal primary education.
"If this summit doesn't produce a strong commitment to strengthen co-operation around the Millennium Development Goals...then we may as well forget the project," Watkins said.
"If that happens that would be an absolutely shocking indictment of the international community, and in particular of the key governments that failed to cooperate to deliver on the promises," he told a news conference to publish the 2005 report.
The annual report painted a dismal picture. Watkins said one child died from poverty every three seconds, 1.2 billion people were living on less than $1 a day and, at current rates of progress, 47 million children would not be in school by 2015.
The cumulative effect of failing to reach the target for cutting child deaths would mean 41 million extra and avoidable deaths over the next decade, the report said.
The UN report said 50 countries, with a combined population of 900 million, were actually moving backwards on at least one of the development goals.
"The UN summit provides a critical opportunity to adopt the bold action plans needed not just to get back on track for 2015 but to overcome the deep inequalities that divide humanity," the report said.
It said failure would not just result in condemnation of the world's leaders but also threatened world safety because poverty and inequality were the fuel of conflict.
Watkins said the leaders had to build on a pledge by the Group of Eight rich nations in July to boost aid and cut debts crushing the poorest countries, reform world trade that still shackled developing countries and prevent wars.
No single one or even combination of two of these pillars of world prosperity and security was adequate. All three had to be tackled in concert, Watkins said. "This really is a crossroads," he said.
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