VIENNA, Dec 1: The war on terrorism has pushed the fight against the poverty that afflicts billions of people off the international agenda, a leading US economist told the UN’s development organization on Monday.

“Development was pushed off the world’s agenda this year by an agenda about war,” Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, told an opening session of the annual meeting in Vienna of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

He said the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, which have “dominated the world’s agenda for more than two years, claimed 3,000 lives.

“(But) every day 20,000 people are dying of their poverty from (not being able to afford treatment against diseases like) AIDS, TB and malaria,” said Sachs, who is special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on a group of poverty alleviation initiatives called the Millennium Development Goals.

Sachs said the United States will this year “spend 450 billion dollars (535 million dollars) on the military and 10 billion dollars on development assistance, a ratio of 45 to one.

“What kind of world are we creating when we have to struggle so hard to keep the development agenda on the world’s mind,” Sachs said.

The world’s most pressing single problem is “the abject poverty of billions of people” rather than the war on terrorism, Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner said at the UNIDO conference.

“The fight against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction figures prominently on the agenda in the major capitals of the world... and rightly so,” she said.

But she said the UNIDO meeting “turns our attention in a somewhat different, yet not unrelated direction” as “the most pressing single global problem we face today is that of the abject poverty of billions of people.”

Alluding to the possible link between poverty and terrorism, she said: “If we do not succeed in tackling this issue (of poverty), it will become a problem of world peace.”

UNIDO director Carlos Alfredo Magarinos said he did not want to draw a direct link between poverty and terrorism but he said that “future national security policies will have to include, from their very beginning, a strong development component.”

“The United States is spending 87 billion dollars in Iraq and one billion in Africa to fight AIDS,” Sachs said.

“That’s a choice and it’s not the right choice,” he said.

“Three billion dollars a year to control malaria in sub-Sahara Africa could have saved millions of lives this year,” he said.

“The war on terrorism can not be won if the war on terrorism is only a military agenda,” Sachs said.

He blasted the International Monetary Fund for being insensitive to peoples suffering.

He said he had told IMF officials: “Your policies are killing people. You’re killing people with stable prices.”

Sachs said poor countries needed to have access to export markets, and not be blocked by trade barriers, and have to receive foreign investment since they do not have the money to carry out infrastructure projects such as paving roads.—AFP