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Development Programme (UNDP), said the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean can only count on their own resources to face the challenge of living up to the MDGs, because ”no one is going to give them non-refundable aid.” This remains the region with the greatest income gap between rich and poor, Ganuza pointed out. The MDGs were agreed by world leaders at a U.N. summit in September 2000 as a strategy to uproot poverty, inequality and pollution by 2015. Next September, the U.N. General Assembly will hold a special session to assess the progress made towards compliance with the targets, which include cutting the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, suffering hunger, and lacking access to potable water in half by 2015. The MDGs also include achieving universal preschool coverage and primary school completion, promoting gender equality, curbing infant mortality, improving maternal health, fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other global epidemics, and guaranteeing environmental sustainability. ”We will have to meet the Millennium Goals with what we have,” said Ganuza. If the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean want to reduce poverty and inequality, they must make these aims the specific focus of public policies, which is a ”new phenomenon” in the region, he added. Although ”with many shortcomings still,” 12 countries in the region already have national poverty reduction strategies, something that did not exist in 1997, the economist said at the seventh international conference on globalisation and development problems, which drew more than 1,400 delegates from 42 countries to Havana Feb. 7-11. However, there are ”extremely high levels of inequality” in the region, which make it difficult to reduce poverty merely on the basis of economic growth, he warned. ”If we attack the problem of inequality, the growth rates necessary to achieve many of the Millennium Goals will be much more normal,” said Ganuza. If Brazil, for example, tried to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty based solely on economic growth, the economy would have to expand 250 percent over the next 10 years, he observed. But if ”from here to 2015 it redistributes 30 percent” of the national income, it would only have to grow 50 percent to meet the poverty reduction goal, he added, noting that the situation is similar in the rest of the countries of Latin America. ”Latin America continues to be the world region with the worst income distribution indicators of all. This situation has been exacerbated by the fact that some countries have actually witnessed an increase in income concentration,” says the Social Panorama of Latin America 2004 report published in November by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). According to the Andean Development Corporation, the proportion of the population living on less than two dollars a day amounted to 37 percent in Brazil, 39 percent in Mexico, 45 percent in Argentina, 48 percent in Venezuela, 50 percent in Colombia, 54 percent in Peru and 62 percent in Bolivia. But ”in terms of politics and policies, we know very little about what to do to redistribute wealth without causing social upheavals,” said Ganuza in one of the last sessions of the Havana conference. The United Nations estimates that one billion people worldwide live in extreme poverty, scraping by on less than a dollar a day. But U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently said the MDGs ”are not utopian. They are eminently achievable.” In a speech that lasted over four hours, Cuban President Fidel Castro complained during the conference about the high concentration of wealth, saying that 80 percent of the world population has ”almost nothing and 20 percent has almost everything.” A U.N. report released in January in New York states that extreme poverty could be cut in half if rich nations assign 0.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to development aid for poor countries. Currently, the world's industrialised nations, which committed themselves to earmarking 0.7 percent of GDP to foreign aid, allot only 0.25 percent to that end, said Ganuza. Nevertheless, in Latin America and the Caribbean development aid does not play a decisive role, he added, since the region is almost a marginal recipient of such funds, and there is awareness that meeting the MDGs is not linked to aid flows, but has to do with the way national income is distributed.