Geldof ‘not thrilled’ as UN fails to deliver

BOB GELDOF gave the UN just four out of 10 yesterday for failing to make monumental pledges on debt, trade and development aid.

He said the New York world summit, the biggest meeting of world leaders in history, had failed to live up to expectations.

“I am not thrilled,” he said.

The Irish rocker said the best the summit had achieved was simply to reiterate what was agreed at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, two months ago.

There, the world’s main industrialised countries pledged to double aid to Africa by 2010.

“I understand this is a process but the process should have been accelerated and added to at the UN,” Geldof said.

“In a sense it was suborned by other factors which could not have been predicted.”

The poverty campaigner, who was a driving force behind the worldwide Live8 concerts in July, appeared alongside British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the summit to appeal for action.

Mr Blair, who has also expressed frustration with the watered-down UN blueprint for reform, warned world leaders there were just 100 days to go before the World Trade Organisation meeting in Hong Kong.

“Everyone around the world has tried to call each others’ bluff on trade,” he said. “If we have a failure... it will echo around the world and I am not prepared to have that, not without the most monumental struggle.”

Both the US and Europe have failed to drop tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies that price African nations out of the market.

Poverty is still the “greatest political problem’ facing world leaders Geldof claimed later.

Geldof said: “Yes, Ethiopia and the famine was 20 years ago, but famine is a symptom of poverty, so is dying from illness, so is lack of education. Now we have Niger.”

“Band Aid puts hundreds of thousands of pounds into Niger, but we are dealing with the symptoms of poverty.

“What we need now is to deal with the structure of poverty. It’s economical and political. It’s not sexy, and progress is incremental,” he added.

However, Geldof said progress to end world poverty could “never come quick enough.”

He said: “We need to keep these guys, the leaders, focused on our greatest political problem, which is poverty. Out of that spins everything else.

“Every night I see another person dying. I will shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to ensure that person does not die time and time again.”