The UN high-level meeting of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to be held on Thursday at the UN headquarters in New York. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will deliver a key-note speech to the meeting.

On September 6, 2000, delegates from 189 countries, including heads of state or government from more than 150 countries, gathered at the UN headquarters in New York to attend the Millennium Summit to discuss and map out the development strategies for the new century.

The leaders endorsed the United Nations Millennium Declaration and pledged to halve the world's poverty rate by 2015. The MDGs were a product of subsequent discussions.

The MDGs have eight goals: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, popularize primary education, promote gender equality, boost women's rights, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development.

It has also specified the goals, aspiring to halve the population whose daily income is less than one US dollar a day, halve the mortality rate of children under five years old, reduce by three fourths the maternal mortality ratio, contain and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

After the MDGs are introduced, many countries have formulated concrete plans to work for the goals, but varied progress has been achieved in different countries and developed countries have also failed to deliver their aid promises.

The UN's Millennium Development Goals Report 2008 released in September pointed out that if the current situation continues, many MDGs are hard to be materialized by the set date.

The report quoted World Bank's data as saying that the world's population living in extreme poverty was reduced from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion from 1990 to 2005, and is expected to drop to 900 million by 2015.

But most of the people lifted out of poverty live in East Asia, particularly in China, while the poverty rate reduced in other parts of the world is far from being satisfactory.

In Sub-Saharan Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), on the contrary, the poverty-stricken population has even grown.

Meanwhile, the international community is facing a range of new challenges from the surging energy and food prices and the recession of world economy, making the prospects to realize the MDGs rather bleak.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed concerns about the progress towards the MDGs and has decided to convene a high-level meeting on the MDGs during the general debate of the 63rd United Nations General Assembly, hoping the meeting would galvanize the global efforts to achieve the MDGs.

(Xinhua News Agency September 25, 2008)