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UNITED NATIONS, Friday (AFP) Eighteen months after an international summit on financing Third World development and slashing world poverty, the United Nations deplored the stagnating pace of progress.

"In 2002, for the sixth consecutive year, developing countries made a net transfer of financial resources to other countries," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said at the opening of special two-day General Assembly session.

"Moreover," he said, "last year's was the largest such negative resource transfer ever: almost 200 billion dollars."

Funds "should be moving from developed countries to developing countries, but these numbers tell us the opposite is happening," he added.

An international summit in New York in 2000 established goals - known as the Millennium Development Goals - aimed at eliminating extreme poverty and famine, promoting sexual equality and the enfranchisement of women, and fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 2015.

A high-profile follow up meeting of leaders some 60 nations in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, fleshed out the means of implementing those goals. The event was assisted by US President George W. Bush, Cuban President Fidel Castro, and scores of other world leaders.

In Monterrey, the United States and the European Union announced increased aid to Third World development, and an ongoing dialogue began between rich and poor nations. Developing countries were also told what they needed to do to help themselves.

However, said Annan, "while overseas development aid has increased, it is still far short of what is required to meet the Millennium Development Goals."

Resources "that could be promoting investment and growth in developing countries, or building schools and hopitals, or supporting other steps towards the Millennium Development Goals, are instead being transferred abroad," Annan told the assembly.

"Despite promising investment opportunities in the developing world and improved economic policies, fear and uncertainty are keeping resources from being deployed where they are needed most.

"If financing for development means anything, we must reverse this negative balance sheet and fix the system so that all countries and all people, especially the poorest, can benefit," said Annan.

But since the Monterrey event, mounting international tensions, lagging industrialized nation economies and the failure of World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, in September have painted a gloomier picture for Third World development.

WTO deputy director Francisco Thompson-Flores, citing a World Bank estimate, said that if the Doha round of multilateral trade talks succeeds, it could mean the generation of some 520 billion dollars for development by 2015 and help 144 million people out of poverty.

The goals could only be reached, he added, if governments showed "courage" and if the international community makes good on its financial commitments. International Monetary Fund director general Horst Koehler said sound and lasting world growth was the most important condition to realizing decisive progress in the fight against poverty.

"The global economic outlook is improving," said Koehler. "Prospects for a recovery are firming in the advanced economies, led by developments in the United States. "This is good news for emerging markets and developing country economies as well," he said. "The IMF will continue to play its role in implementing the Monterrey Consensus."

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