European leaders have offered one billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) at the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit here, amid mounting calls for money to pay for the battle to cut extreme poverty. The huge sum was offered late Monday by EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso at the end of the first day of a summit on the goals, knocked off track by the international financial crisis.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero earlier stepped up a push for a new global financial tax, raising pressure on the world's wealthy countries at the three-day summit to contribute more in the drive to eradicate poverty and improve child and maternal health.
African nations in particular are calling for more action and the West can expect little sympathy when the likes of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak on Tuesday. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the struggling effort to reach eight key development goals by 2015 could still be met if world leaders provide the necessary money and political will.
The aims include cutting the more than one billion people living on less than a dollar a day, reducing by two-thirds the number of children who die before the age of five, seeking fairer trade, and spreading the Internet to the world's poor. While spectacular progress has been made in some areas, most experts say none of the goals will be reached by the target date. The international financial crisis has cut off badly needed funding. Sarkozy said: "We have no right to shelter behind the economic crisis as supposed grounds for doing less." "Finance has globalized, so why should we not ask finance to participate in stabilising the world by taking a tax on each financial transaction."