UNITED NATIONS, (AFP) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will lead a summit of world leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly here Monday aimed at fighting hunger and poverty across the globe.
His counterparts from France and Chile, Jacques Chirac and Ricardo Lagos, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will also speak, with some 40 heads of state expected to attend.
The gathering, which could also burnish Brazil's push for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, follows a January meeting of Annan, Chirac, Lula and Lagos in Geneva on the "Action Against Hunger and Poverty" initiative.
The Geneva declaration focused on the importance of development in the fight against hunger and poverty, part of a series of wide-ranging UN targets to be reached worldwide by 2015 known as the Millennium Development Goals.
At that meeting, the participants pledged to "promote greater international cooperation and increase the availability of resources to tackle pressing economic and social challenges, particularly that of hunger and poverty."
They also gave their support for innovative financing ideas such as Britain's International Finance Facility, which would use capital markets to increase the amount of development aid available to nations, and of international taxes on arms sales and financial transactions to revitalise the flagging global drive against hunger and poverty.
Lack of funding from governments has raised fears recently that the Millenium Development Goals -- including a target to cut in half the number of malnourished people by 2015 -- might not be met.
An estimated 840 million people live in hunger and 1.1 billion people struggle to survive on less than one dollar a day, according to the United Nations.
Since coming to office in January 2003, Lula has sought to build a coalition of developing nations to push for more development aid and an end to agricultural subsidies in rich nations that hurt poor nations' opportunities to compete in the global trade marketplace.
At a UN conference on trade and development in Sao Paulo in June, Lula called for "a new trade geography" between rich and poor nations.
"That is why we must have a political force that is based on an alliance of southern countries," Lula said at the time.
Monday will also see a separate meeting on the "Fair Globalization" report issued by the International Labor Organization earlier this year.