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World leaders still failing on major global challenges: report
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  • GENEVA (AFP) Jan 24, 2005
    World leaders have made no progress in keeping promises to tackle key global challenges such as poverty or climate change and need to engage the corporate world far more, a think tank set up by the World Economic Forum said Monday.

    In a report released just two days before the Forum's annual meeting of global political and business leaders, the Global Governance Initiative said countries had failed to improve on last year's ratings of three to four out of ten in cutting hunger and poverty, or improving health, education, human rights and the environment.

    The annual report card also reduced the international community's score from three to two out of ten on peace and security, due to atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region, repeated terror attacks from Madrid to Beslan, and the situation in Iraq.

    Other failures included lingering agricultural subsidies in industrialised nations that marginalised poorest countries, "turf battles" between international agencies and donors hampering the fight against HIV/AIDS, or subsidies encouraging the use of polluting fossil fuels such as oil.

    Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the presidents of Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa are due to join business leaders in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos from Wednesday to discuss many of those issues.

    The report said even if business was only "part of the problem" and "part of solution", the resources and skills of "profitable and responsible" private enterprise should be tapped to create wealth, share technology and improve living standards.

    The WEF underlined the response to the tsunami disaster as an example of how the corporate world could also "contribute towards global goals".

    The catastrophe demonstrated that the world was "ever more susceptible to common risks and with a shared responsibility to tackle them," said Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister chairing the initiative.

    But the think tank also warned that "bad or corrupt" business practices contributed to conflict, poverty, human rights abuse and environmental decline.

    "In the wake of major corporate scandals, the business community faces a strong need to rebuild trust," the report noted.

    "Businesses need new markets and business opportunities to remain competitive, and those opportunities require healthy, educated, prosperous populations in stable societies throughout the world".

    Companies could contribute more by developing new products to tackle environmental challenges, or by investing in ventures like corporate HIV/AIDS treatment programmes or technologies that benefit poor communities even if they do not meet a "pure business case", the group said.

    The World Economic Forum's membership is largely composed of major corporate figures.

    Critics have complained that Davos fosters tacit arrangements between big business and politicians that are beyond democratic scrutiny.

    Blair is due to launch a task force with major companies in Davos to help tackle climate change, the German business daily Handelsblatt reported Monday.

    They include the oil giant BP, Deutsche Bank, the reinsurer Swiss Re, British Airways, the metals group Alcan and the Ford Motor Company, it added.




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