Green groups critical of moves to fight poverty

THE United States and European nations began showcasing public-private partnerships to fight poverty at the Earth Summit yesterday amid growing criticism they will help businesses more than the poor.

Delegates at the 10-day summit resumed talks that had stretched late into the night to end a wrangle over poor nations' calls for rich states to phase out vast subsidies to farmers after making progress on other aid and trade.

The US was set to roll out several partnerships yesterday, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars in resources from existing programmes and funds to programmes meant to meet summit goals of halving poverty by 2015.