BRITAIN:Gordon Brown said yesterday that he had galvanised world leaders including US president George Bush and leading companies to combat what he described as the global emergency of deepening poverty in Africa.
The British prime minister disclosed that since entering No 10 he has persuaded 14 world leaders and 21 companies to sign a declaration that the world is not on track to meet its ambitious millennium development goals in 2015, and that efforts must be redoubled within a year.
Mr Brown persuaded President Bush to sign up to the declaration yesterday, ensuring that he had garnered the support of all leaders of the G7 group of industrialised countries.
His immediate aim is to convene a UN conference next year that brings together governments, businesses, faith groups and charities such as the Gates Foundation. He argues that this broader partnership has been one of the missing elements in the fight against poverty.
Mr Brown launched his initiative in a speech at the UN in New York, hours after spending two days with Mr Bush, who has been deeply sceptical about the UN. The prime minister met former president Bill Clinton on Monday to discuss his plan, another sign that he is prepared to work with leading figures inside and outside the White House.
He adopted the language of rock star Bono to tell a meeting of ambassadors in New York: "It is time to call it what it is: a development emergency which needs emergency action. If 30,000 children died needlessly and avoidably every day in America or Britain, we would call it an emergency, and an emergency is what it is."
The UN set its millennium development goals in 2000, with targets for 2015 covering issues such as poverty, primary education and infant mortality. "Seven years on it is already clear that our pace is too slow, our direction too uncertain and our vision at risk," Mr Brown said. "The calendar says we are halfway from 2000 to 2015. But the reality is that we are a million miles away from success."
He hoped to call a meeting of the UN next year to see what progress had been made in creating what he described as "the greatest coalition of conscience in pursuit of the greatest of causes". Mr Brown said that he wanted to mobilise what some people called "soft power".
"I call it 'people power' - people power in the support of the leadership of developing countries." Mr Brown's officials say it is not a lack of scientific, economic or development knowledge that is holding back progress, but largely a lack of political will.
Mr Brown secured his first foreign policy victory last night as the UN Security Council voted unanimously to back an Anglo-French proposal to deploy a 26,000-strong international force to Darfur with a mandate to stop the killings that have displaced nearly two million people.
British officials had earlier said that China's opposition had been overcome, setting in motion the dispatch of international peacekeepers that has been delayed for a year while the bloodshed in western Sudan continued.
Mr Brown described it as "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today. More than 200,000 dead, two million displaced and four million on food aid."
Under the Darfur resolution, which Mr Brown hammered out with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and for which he secured the support of Mr Bush, a joint force of 19,555 soldiers will be established by the UN and the African Union, along with more than 6,000 police officers from around the world.
The force will set up an operational headquarters by the end of October and reach full strength by the end of the year, when it will take over from the small African Union force in Darfur.
Crucially, the force will have a more muscular mandate than the African troops, who have been powerless to intervene in the ethnic cleansing of local people by militias sponsored by Khartoum. The force will be deployed under chapter seven of the UN charter, giving it the right to use force to carry out its mission, to deliver humanitarian supplies and protect civilians.
Most of the troops will come from African countries, with Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda among the major contributors, but elements will come from around the world, including a team of Chinese engineers who will build the base.
Although Britain tabled the resolution, Mr Brown's aides said Britain would contribute few troops, but provide as much as £100 million (€148 million) in logistical and economic support.
Mr Brown said yesterday that if the killings continued he and others would "redouble our efforts to impose further sanctions".