Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in an interview, "It is a message of hope, a message of 'Yes, we can do something about it' and a message of 'let's work together and do it'."
The Secretary General's Millennium Report published in time for the Summit recognised that, "The benefits of globalization are obvious: faster growth, higher living standards, new opportunities. Yet a backlash has begun, because these benefits are so unequally distributed, and because the global market is not yet underpinned by rules based on shared social objectives."
In May of this year, a parallel people's assembly called the Millennium Forum brought together some 1,350 representatives of non-governmental organisations from more than 100 countries.
Their Declaration, which was presented to the Summit, called for the creation of a Poverty Eradication Fund, among many concrete recommendations. It said, "Poverty is a violation of human rights. With some 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty, it is the most widespread violation of human rights in the world. Poverty exists not only in the developing countries, but is also a dramatic and hidden reality in the industrialised countries. ... Poverty eradication is not an automatic consequence of economic growth; it requires purposeful action to redistribute wealth and land, to construct a safety net and to provide universal free access to education. We call on our governments, and the United Nations to make poverty eradication a top political priority."
The Millennium Forum also laid out their vision of the future as, "a world that is human-centred and genuinely democratic, where all human beings are full participants and determine their own destinies. In our vision we are one human family, in all our diversity, living on one common homeland and sharing a just, sustainable and peaceful world, guided by universal principles of democracy, equality, inclusion, voluntarism, non-discrimination and participation by all persons... It is a world where peace and human security, as envisioned in the principles of the United Nations Charter, replace armaments, violent conflict and wars. It is a world where everyone lives in a clean environment with a fair distribution of the earth's resources."
Have we heard it all before? Well, yes. Is repetition going to make this century different from the last for the billions of people living in poverty? Only
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