1.2 billion people are in extreme poverty

Poverty today is a huge problem. About 1.2 billion people are very poor and have less than a dollar a day to live on. Three quarters of them, or 900 million, live in the countryside. Most of them live in Asia, about a quarter of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The very poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa.

The rate of poverty reduction is less than a third of what is needed to achieve the global target

Between 1970 and 1990, many more people escaped from poverty and hunger than ever before; they lived longer and learned to read and write. This happened in countries like China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh. But after 1990 that progress has slowed down.

To reduce world poverty by half by 2015, we have to get people to escape from poverty three times faster than they do now, and six times faster in sub-Saharan Africa.

The proportion of ODA going to agriculture fell from about 20% in the late 1980s to about 12% today

	The governments of rich countries gave less help to poor countries between 1988 and 1998, and less of that help went to agriculture: the share fell from 20 per cent to 12 per cent, from nearly USD 5 billion to just over USD 3 billion in 1998