International call for action to aid poorer nations

International bodies called on Saturday for concerted action to help developing nations confront the global economic crisis, but the absence of major leaders at a UN aid conference dampened hopes of concrete initiatives.

"The financial crisis is not the only crisis we face. We also confront a development emergency and accelerating climate change," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at the opening of a four-day conference on Financing for Development.

"These threats are inextricably linked. They must be dealt with as one," he told journalists in Qatar. "We need a truly global stimulus plan that meets the needs of emerging economies and developing countries."

Ban hosted a "retreat" for world leaders on Friday aimed at converting intentions expressed at a Group of 20 summit in Washington this month into "concrete recommendations" ahead of the next G-20 meeting in London in April.

However, he admitted that only 10 national leaders were among the 34 or 35 high-level delegates who turned up, and no conclusions were announced.

Ban said he still hopes the conference can come up with concrete plans as well as updating a 2002 Monterrey Consensus on aid to developing countries.

call for global solutions," European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso told the conference.

"A global answer requires the presence of all regions in the world, representing the voice of the rich, the emerging and the poorest," he said, noting that 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Developing countries already face the challenge of climate change on top of threats to food and energy security, "while hundreds of millions of people cannot afford basic foodstuffs and risk falling deeper into poverty," Barroso said.

The head of the US delegation denied that the absence of most leaders of the world's major economies means the meeting is a waste of time.

"The conference is very worthwhile. The development ministers are here. Those are the people through whom development financing is done," Henrietta Fore, the state department's director of US foreign assistance, told AFP.

President George W Bush "has kept to the aid commitments made in the Monterrey Consensus in 2002 and there is every indication" that president-elect Barack Obama will honour those commitments, she said.

Obama has pledged to double international aid.

Fore, who reports to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, may lose her job under the Obama administration but until then plans to maintain and step up US help to developing countries.

In Doha she sees her key role as urging other countries to keep to or increase their aid commitments, while back home she is supporting legislation before Congress to increase some categories of aid.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said EU aid to poorer countries -- pledged at 61 billion dollars this year -- would not be sacrificed.

"While we are all facing these growing deficits and rising unemployment, we have decided not to sacrifice the Millennium objectives but to fulfil the promises made to you regarding public aid for development," he said.

Ariane Alpa, head of the Oxfam International delegation in Doha, said that France, like the vast majority of rich countries, is not on target to reach its objective of giving 0.56 percent of its Gross National Income in aid by 2010.

"It has just announced a development budget for the next three years which does not represent a credible effort to do so," she said.

The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani, said he believed that too great an expectation is being placed on oil producers and called for the establishment of a "representative multilateral forum."

Meanwhile in a speech at Doha broadcast on Iranian state television, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad renewed his verbal attacks on Israel, saying it had "reached the end of the road."