CHAPTER I POPULATION AND POVERTY IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

It is accepted by most international agencies, including the different parts of the United Nations system, that “development ” cannot be considered to have really taken place unless the incidence of poverty has been reduced. Poverty elimination or reduction has come to centre stage in the development rhetoric, and funding agencies are attempting to give some real content to this objective by specifying indicators according to which programmes or projects may be considered to have succeeded in meeting these goals. The influential Millennium Declaration, adopted by world leaders at the Millennium Summit convened by the United Nations in New York from 6 to 8 September 2000, included the following statement: We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want. The declaration recognizes the need for a fair international multilateral trading and financial system, good governance at the national level, specific efforts to deal with the problems of the least developed countries, small island states and landlocked countries, and measures at the national and international levels to make the debt of low- and middle-income developing countries sustainable in the long term. Specific targets were specified to halve the proportions of the world’