Main proposals in new report on poverty

Following are the main proposals issued from an advisory body the United Nations set up to help achieve its Millennium Development Goals. Those goals, agreed in 2000, are to cut in half extreme poverty and hunger, reduce child mortality and reverse the spread of AIDS and malaria by 2015, among other targets.

- Developing nations should produce detailed strategies to meet the Millennium goals by 2006. They should include scaling up public investments, promoting the private sector and establishing good governance and respecting human rights.

- High-income nations should increase development aid from 0.25 per cent of their gross national income in 2003 to 0.44 per cent in 2006 and 0.54 per cent - or $195 billion - in 2015 in support of the Millennium goals. These countries should reach the target of 0.7 per cent for both the Millennium goals and other development aid by 2015.

- Wealthy donors should identify at least a dozen "fast-track" countries, which are able to handle assistance well for a rapid increase of development aid.

- Rich and poor countries should participate in "quick win" projects for fast results that would save lives and cut hunger immediately. They include providing antiretroviral drugs to three million AIDS victims by 2005, eliminating school fees and uniforms and providing free schools lunches, distributing mosquito bed nets to prevent malaria deaths and giving poor farmers soil nutrients.

- Rich nations should open their markets to developing country exports through the Doha round of global trade talks which should be completed no later than 2006.

- International donors should support scientific research, estimated at $7 billion a year by 2015, to address the needs of the poor in health, agriculture, natural resource and environmental management, energy and climate change.