Leaders discuss world poverty at U.N.

UNITED NATIONS -- Poverty is "the most destructive weapon of mass destruction," Brazil's president said Monday as world leaders spotlighted the growing gap between rich and poor and the often devastating impact of globalization on millions of people trying to eke out a living.\nMore than 50 heads of state and government, including Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Jacques Chirac of France, are in New York on the eve of the annual U.N. General Assembly ministerial meeting to focus on innovative ways to finance the alleviation of poverty and to ensure that millions of the world's poor don't get left behind by globalization.\nSilva told a high-level meeting that "fair globalization must begin with the right of everyone to a job."\n"Dignified work, like the fight against hunger, cannot wait," he said. "The most destructive weapon of mass destruction today is poverty."\nChirac, also a keynote speaker, said he and Silva had decided to propose new approaches to "ensure that the world's unprecedented wealth becomes a vehicle for the integration, rather than exclusion, of the most underprivileged."\n"It is up to us to give globalization a conscience," he said. "There is no future in globalization that tolerates predatory behavior and the hoarding of its profits by a minority. There is no future in globalization that destroys the social and economic balances, crushes the weak and denies human rights."\nAnother high-level session Monday afternoon -- the brainchild of Silva -- is focusing on financing the fight against poverty.\nThe meetings are expected to help set the stage for next year's summit that the General Assembly is holding to assess progress toward meeting the goals that world leaders agreed on at the 2000 Millennium Summit. They include halving the number of people living in dire poverty, ensuring that all children have an elementary school education, that all families have clean water, and that the AIDS epidemic is halted -- all by 2015.\nMonday's morning session focused on a report by a U.N. commission that said the income gap between the richest and poorest countries has widened in the past four decades.