Prescott joins bid to save world poverty summit

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, is today helping to launch an emergency attempt to save a crucial summit on world poverty from disaster.

He arrives in Rio de Janeiro this morning to join talks aimed at working out a rescue plan for the world summit on sustainable development due to open in Johannesburg in August. Preparatory negotiations broke down in Bali two weeks ago.

Tomorrow he will meet Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, Thabo Mbeki, the South African President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Brazilian President, and Goran Person, the Swedish Prime Minister. to hammer out a strategy to save what is the biggest attempt to tackle world poverty in over two decades.

The Bali meeting, to pave the way for agreement at the summit, ended with more than 100 points of disagreement. The administration of President George Bush blocked progress and refused to negotiate, while weak leadership in Europe and the Third World compounded the problem.

Brazil held the last Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and the original one, in 1972, took place in Stockholm, Sweden.

The meeting marks Mr Prescott's return to the fray, after being blown off course by press reports last month that alleged that he was going to the Bali conference for a "junket". Various senior UN figures are eager for him to get involved again as they believe he is one of the few people who could broker a deal at the summit.

The plan would be to launch a new initiative after the G8 meeting of the leaders of the world's richest countries in Canada on 27 and 28 June.

Mr Prescott said that if the summit fails, the chance to address the needs of the world's poorest people may be lost for a decade or more.

* A report to be published tomorrow by the charity ActionAid will warn G8 leaders that missed targets on aid have cost the lives of 15 million children. It says that they are behind schedule on "virtually every target" set in 1990 in the Millennium Development Goals, supposed to be met by 2015.