UNITED NATIONS — Without too much fanfare, the United Nations admits in its newest report on the progress of the so-called Millennium Development Goals that wealth creation and not wealth redistribution is the main driver behind reduced levels of extreme poverty around the world. Of course, the UN, being an organization that spends most of its time chastising rich countries for not transferring enough money to the developing world — the total last year came to $128.7 billion, the highest ever — is not quite so explicit with its admission. In a foreword by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, praise is given for the progress to the goals themselves, which world leaders meeting in 2000 set with the aim of dramatically reducing extreme poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease around the world within 15 years. "Already, the MDGs have helped lift millions out of poverty," he says — as if merely articulating that we would like to improve the lot of the world's poor magically realizes that desire. But therein lies Ban's dilemma: a key part of the UN's solution at the time was to call for massive increases in overseas development aid — whereas the history of the world economy since 2000 has shown that poverty has disappeared the fastest in countries where business has expanded the most. Hence, only later in the 72 pages of The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 do we see that fact acknowledged with figures showing incredible reductions in poverty in Asia, where growth has skyrocketed, and dismal reductions in sub-Saharan Africa, where economies have only recently begun to pick up. "The fastest growth and sharpest reductions in poverty continue to be found in Eastern Asia, particularly in China, where the poverty rate is expected to fall to under five per cent by 2015," says the report, released Thursday, by the UN's Economic and Social Affairs Department. "India has also contributed to the large reduction in global poverty. In that country, poverty rates are projected to fall from 51 per cent in 1990 to about 22 per cent in 2015." In fact, by 2005, eastern Asia — essentially China — had already exceeded the MDG target of halving the percentage of its population who live on $1.25 day, reducing the figure from 60 per cent to 16 per cent. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa — the world's biggest per capital recipient of overseas development aid — reduced the percentage of its people living in extreme poverty from 58 per cent to only 51 per cent between 1990 and 2005. Still, with the pickup in business in Africa, the UN says the continent is expected to do better for its poor in the coming five years. "Projections for sub-Saharan Africa are slightly more upbeat than previously estimated," says the report. "Based on recent economic growth performance and forecasted trends, the extreme poverty rate in the region is expected to fall below 36 per cent" by 2015. One downside to the rapid economic development: people see jobs being created, and so are attracted to the cities, where there are now an estimated 828 million living in slums, up from 657 million in 1990.

Here again, the report, in three lines at the end of a multi-page section on ensuring environmental sustainability, says how its Human Settlements Program is urging countries to "promote access to affordable land with secure tenure and to create the conditions in which people are able to carve out and sustain a livelihood." In other words, it is advancing the concept of making everyone into a mini-capitalist. Despite the UN's acknowledgment of the power of wealth creation, it continues to focus on encouraging cash transfers from rich to poor countries. Indeed, on Tuesday, it released a 208-page report that contained its most expensive investment plan ever: a call for $72 trillion to be spent over 40 years so that poverty around the world can be eliminated in a "sustainable" manner, through a shift to "green" technologies in world farming. Critics noted the figure is five times the current U.S. annual gross domestic product of $14.66 trillion. "Incremental green investment of about three per cent of world gross product (about $1.9 trillion in 2010) would be required to overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe," said the World Economic and Social Survey 2011, also from the Economic and Social Affairs Department. The report added that such an investment level would need to be reached within the next few years, and that "one half of the required investments would have to be realized in developing countries." That's where the transfer comes in — some $38 trillion would flow mainly from rich countries to the developing world in the next four decades, if the UN were to get its way. This report is a reflection of the notion of "climate debt" that many of the climate change doomsayers discuss. Climate debt is shorthand for the trillions these people say the rich industrialized countries owe to the developing world for having "expropriated" the world's resources, starting at the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. That the UN is behind the idea — and has linked it to a bid to redistribute wealth from rich to poor countries — was confirmed by Ottmar Edenhofer, German co-chair of one of the working groups of the UN's data-assessing Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "If global emission rights are distributed . . . on a per-capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there," he told Germany's NZZ Online Sunday last November. "This will have enormous implications for development policy." He went on to indict developed countries for having industrialized, and stated that a climate change agenda should be used to effect redress for the rest of the world — rather than for upholding the integrity of the environment. "First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community," he said. "But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."