Carter coaches a round: poverty vs development.

• Position: Jimmy Carter - Development Cooperation Forum

World leaders convened on 21 and 22 February in Atlanta, Georgia a high-level Development Cooperation Forum, which was sponsored by The Carter Center (www.cartercenter.org), a non-governmental organization, and co-chaired by United States former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin. Other heavyweights attending included World Bank President James Wolfensohn, United Nations Development Programme Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, the Presidents of Guyana, Mali and Mozambique, and a host of leading development thinkers and experts from both rich and poor countries.

At the Forum, leaders and representatives of developing countries and international development organizations assailed the lack of progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty. Most noted that even with more than one billion people living in abject poverty, there has been a lack of political energy by rich countries to help their poorer neighbours. But those in the ring at The Carter Center headed off with a sense of mission, and some fight left in them, to find a way, if not fully by the international Conference on Financing for Development in March in Monterrey, Mexico, then by the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg from the end of August to the beginning of September.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (see UN Chronicle No.4, 1999) call for extreme poverty to be halved by 2015, as well as for strides in education, health and preservation of the environment. These targets were endorsed by all 189 Member States, from the richest to the poorest, at the 2000 UN Millennium General Assembly. Yet, almost two years into the new millennium, the need for the Forum as a catalyst into the Monterrey and Johannesburg meetings was all too clear. Constraints to improved development cooperation remain-- the result of a scarcity of adequate resources, a shortage of successful partnerships, the still maturing trend of good governance, the unwieldy duplication of efforts, and the shocking mercilessness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and intractable conflicts, and adding to that, the growing threat of terrorism.

In the face of recent reports from various United Nations agencies that the Millennium Development Goals were unlikely to be met without firmly and honestly addressing these constraints, President Carter pressed participants on the "urgent need to move beyond rhetoric and put into action a plan in which...