Integrated Natural Environment and Waste Corporation (INEWCORP-Inc.)

Poverty in its various forms has increasingly occupied the attention of the international community during the last decade. Successive Summits have made commitments to drastically reduce the misery from which so many humans suffer throughout their lives. Such attention is in itself an encouraging step forward, but actual progress is still painfully slow, even though measures to improve the livelihoods of the poor are affordable. Hunger and food insecurity - the most serious forms of extreme poverty - have now become international priorities, and participants in the 1996 World Food Summit made a solemn commitment to halve hunger in the world by 2015.

The Millennium Declaration of 2000 consolidates and restates the commitments agreed during the preceding decade, and can be seen as the final stage of the Summit process. For the first time in a document of its kind, it stresses that, without policies and mechanisms to mobilise private and public resources on a much larger scale, the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for reducing poverty and hunger and for social and sustainable development cannot be achieved. The Declaration is thus a starting point for renewed action in the twenty-first century. The International Conference on Financing for Development can redress the failures and biases of the past by making its prime objective that of ensuring adequate funding for the achievement of the MDGs.

The International Conference on Financing for Development offers the opportunity to put an end to a paradox that characterized the 1990s: that ,while global commitment to progress in the fight against poverty seemed to be gaining strength and the means to tackle the problem were increasing, the volume of resources actually mobilized fell year after year. The gap between commitment and action has widened, which inevitably raises questions about the genuineness of the commitment.