A study by the UNDP — timed to put pressure on G8 leaders ahead of their summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, next month — showed that based on current trends, the global community will miss by a wide margin the targets it set for poverty, infant mortality and education in the millennium development goals agreed to by the U.N. in 2000.

“These numbers should serve as a wake-up call for G8 leaders,” said Kevin Watkins, the director of the U.N.’s Human Development Report office. “Africa cannot afford to see the world’s richest countries sleepwalk their way to a heavily signposted — and easily avoidable — human development disaster.”

In 2000 the U.N. announced that by 2015 the global community would cut infant mortality by two-thirds, halve the number of people living on less than a dollar a day and put every child in school.

On the basis of current UNDP projections, there will be 5 million under-5 deaths in Africa, compared with 2 million if the goals were achieved; 115 million children deprived of an education; and 219 million extra people living below the poverty line.

The outline of a wide deal between George. W. Bush and Tony Blair on debt and aid for Africa took shape Tuesday night after lengthy talks between the leaders in Washington, which were seen as a test of Blair’s true influence over his coalition partner in Iraq. Blair wants to secure a landmark deal for Africa at the summit of G8 leaders in July but is battling against a U.S. administration under little domestic pressure to lift its aid budget.

Blair described talks on a debt relief package for Africa as “close to a deal. We are a significant way to a deal, and that would be very important if we could do that,” he said. “I am increasingly hopeful we can get a good deal on that.”

He conceded that “there are still issues that we need to resolve,” and that British hopes of being able to spell out the details of the package had been dashed, leaving further issues to be resolved at a meeting of G7 finance ministers chaired by Gordon Brown in London this weekend.

Blair acknowledged the details were intricate and that the U.S. was reluctant to fund interest payments to the World Bank in the event of total debt cancellation. A total cancellation of multilateral debt for the poorest African countries would be worth as much as $15 billion.

The prime minister also acknowledged that the Americans seem willing to boost their aid budget further, but only for specific programs covering issues such as water and vaccination. He also said that the U.S. would not fund an aid increase through the British Treasury’s chosen method of an international finance facility, a means of borrowing the money through the bond market.

Many aid agencies reacted angrily to the initial smoke signals emerging from the Washington talks. They feared a Bush offer to provide $674 million for famine relief in Africa represented the limit of American generosity.

Oxfam warned: “To drop the bar now and lower the ambition at this critical juncture would be seen by many as a betrayal.” It added: “Saving Africa has to be more important than saving Blair’s face.”

Blair also seemed to acknowledge that he faced an uphill battle in persuading President Bush to back mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions or to accept that the science on global warming shows the urgency for action. “It is important we recognize the need to take clear and immediate action, whether it is taken from the perspective of climate change or energy security and supply,” he said.

The science academies of the G8 states Tuesday issued a joint demand for action on climate change, saying it was “vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions.”

One source close to the negotiating process over the document, published by the U.K.’s Royal Society after months of discussions, called the support of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for the document “unprecedented.” In 2001 the U.S. academy declined to sign a similar joint statement.

Blair, who will not attend the Live 8 concert in London even though he is delighted at the apparent success of the project, was lobbying Christian right and Republican senators Tuesday in to help create a political backdrop in the United States before which Bush would be willing to act. But with only weeks to the G8 summit and further shuttle diplomacy ahead in Germany, Russia and France next week, time is running out for Prime Minister Blair.

It continues: “This is a choice that will result in the current generation of political leaders going down in history as the leaders that let the MDGs [millennium goals] fail on their watch.

“Instead of delivering action, the U.N. summit could deliver another round of high-sounding declarations, with rich countries offering more words and no action.”

The report says there has been some progress, which has included an increase in life expectancy of two years, child deaths being cut by 3 million a year, an extra 30 million children in school and 130 million removed from extreme poverty. These achievements should not be underestimated, the U.N. says, but “nor should they be exaggerated.”

According to the U.N., 18 countries, with a combined population of 460 million, registered lower scores on the Human Development Index than in 1990 — an unprecedented reversal. The Human Development Index assesses life expectancy, income and literacy. Top places in the table are dominated by Scandinavian countries, while sub-Saharan African countries fill the bottom 25 places.

“In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday, and more than 1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than $1 a day,” the report says. “One fifth of humanity live in countries where many people think nothing of spending $2 a day on a cappuccino. Another fifth of humanity survive on less than $1 a day and live in countries where children die for want of a simple anti-mosquito bed net.”

Calling HIV/AIDS the biggest setback to development since the 14th century Black Death, the U.N. says that life expectancy in Zambia is now lower than in Britain in 1840. In 2003, the pandemic claimed 3 million lives and left an additional 5 million people infected. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for a rising share of child deaths: The region represents 20 percent of births worldwide and 44 percent of child deaths.

But the slowdown extends beyond that region. Some of the most visible globalization “success stories,” including China and India, are failing to convert rising incomes into a decline in child mortality.

“Deep-rooted human development inequality is at the heart of the problem. On many of the MDGs the poor and the disadvantaged are falling behind. Cross-country analysis suggests that child mortality rates among the poorest 20 percent of the population are falling at less than half the world average. Because the poorest 20 percent account for a disproportionately large share of child mortality, this is slowing the overall rate of progress towards achieving the MDGs.”

The report says the world’s richest 500 individuals have got a combined income that is greater than that of the poorest 416 million; and 2.5 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, are living on less than $2 a day.

Redistributing 1.6 percent of the income of the richest 10 percent of the global population would provide the $300 billion needed to lift the 1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day out of extreme poverty, at least temporarily.

The U.N. says that achieving sustainable poverty reduction requires dynamic processes allowing poor countries and their inhabitants to produce their way out of deprivation. This means scaling up aid, breaking down trade barriers and halting civil wars. Since 1990 increased prosperity in rich countries has done little to enhance generosity, the report says: Per capita income has increased by $6,070, while per capita aid has fallen by $1.

The U.N. says that for every $1 rich countries spend on aid, they allocate $10 to military spending. “Just the increase in defense spending since 2000, if devoted to aid instead, would be sufficient to reach the … U.N. target of spending 0.7 percent [of gross national income] on aid. Spending on HIV/AIDS represents three days of military spending.”

The report predicts that the target for reducing child mortality will be missed by 4.4 million avoidable deaths, the equivalent to three times the number of children under 5 living in London, New York and Tokyo. An additional 380 million people will be living on less than $1 a day.

The “development disaster” will be counted in avoidable deaths, children out of school and lost opportunities to cut poverty. “That disaster is as avoidable as it is predictable.”

However, they insisted that Bush had moved and, if he stuck to his promises, would provide 20 percent of the world’s aid going to sub-Sahara Africa by 2010, as well as 60 percent of the food aid.

Blair was informed of the Bush move Thursday morning, and his aides said the announcement, in conjunction with the previously announced debt relief package, “creates real momentum for a successful outcome.”

Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, said: “It looks as if we are almost there. It looks now as if we will reach the additional $25 billion in development aid for Africa by 2010 that the Commission for Africa said was needed in its report in the spring.”

The aid package came as the Paris Club of creditors unveiled a plan for the biggest debt relief package in African history, announcing it would open talks with Nigeria to eradicate $31 billion of debts within six months.

Nigeria, seen as the potential motor of the African economy, has been battling to fight corruption, and the announcement represents a triumph for the lobbying efforts of the Nigerian finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The new Bush package contained four elements:

– An extra $1.2 billion over five years aimed at halving the mortality rate from malaria in 15 African countries through new drugs and insecticide-treated nets. The program would start in Tanzania, Uganda and Angola next year, followed by a further four countries in 2007 and a further five in 2008. The mosquito-borne disease infects as many as 400 million people worldwide, killing 1 million a year.

– An extra $400 million over four years for America’s African education initiative, designed to train teachers and provide scholarships for 300,000 girls. Only half of African children complete primary education.

– An extra $55 million over four years to help with legal rights for women in four countries.

– Training of 40,000 African peacekeepers over the next five years as part of a wider G8 initiative.

The bulk of the proposed doubling in U.S. aid to Africa will come from already planned increases in aid to Africa set aside in the Millennium Challenge Account and anti-AIDS programs.

A Brookings Institution study released this week said that in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, total spending on African aid was $2.3 billion. The total for 2004, the last completed year of the Bush administration, was $3.4 billion, or just over a 50 percent increase. Much of the increase was in emergency food aid.

Moreover, it came three days after John Snow, U.S. Treasury secretary, poured cold water on the idea that the world’s central banks might get together to arrest the dollar’s fall. The history of “efforts to impose nonmarket valuations on currencies is at best unrewarding and checkered”, he said in London.

Europe got the message. Eurozone policymakers are growing increasingly alarmed about the fall in the value of the dollar, since it threatens to choke off exports — the one area of growth in the 12-nation single-currency zone. They would like nothing more than to wade into the foreign exchanges in concert with the Fed and the central banks of Asia to put a floor under the greenback, but they know that Washington has no interest in such a move.

Joaquin Almunia, Europe’s monetary affairs commissioner, said last week: “The more the euro rises, the more voices will start asking for intervention. It has to be a coordinated effort, but it seems that our friends across the Atlantic aren’t interested.”

That sums things up rather nicely. There are two reasons why the Bush administration is not willing to play ball with the Europeans. The first is that it sees a lower dollar as inevitable given that the U.S. current account deficit is running at $50 billion-plus a month. A lower dollar makes U.S. exports cheaper and imports dearer.

According to this interpretation, the Americans are now simply bowing to the inevitable. Stephen Lewis, of Monument Securities, says the markets have finally lost patience with the laxity of Washington toward the twin trade and budget deficits, pumped up by cheap money and tax cuts. “The truth is that the U.S. fiscal and monetary excesses, which have been essential to keeping the global economy afloat in recent years, are no longer tolerated in the foreign-exchange markets,” he said. “The status quo is not an option. The only question is how the pain of adjustment will be apportioned.”

The second reason is that the Bush administration has neither forgotten nor forgiven France and Germany for the stance they adopted over Iraq. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder weren’t interested in helping the U.S. to topple Saddam, and now it’s payback time. If the European economies are suffering as a result of the weak dollar, why should the U.S. care? What’s happening in the currency markets is simply American unilateralism in a different guise.

In the short term, therefore, the dollar looks like a one-way bet. City analysts are already talking about it hitting $1.35 against the euro, and given the tendency of financial markets to overshoot, nobody would be that surprised if it fell to $1.40 over the coming months. A smooth and steady decline — which is what Snow is trying to finesse — would do little damage to the U.S. economy, but it would hit Europe hard.

This might seem perverse, given all the fuss there was when the euro was falling against the dollar immediately after its launch. Then, however, the problem was one of credibility for a fledgling currency because the impact of a weak euro was to boost demand for European goods. With a strong euro, there will be a direct impact on European exporters. Given that the latest figures show that Germany and France both grew by only 0.1 percent in the third quarter, a sharp drop in exports could quite easily push the eurozone’s biggest economies back into recession.

Growth forecasts for the eurozone — already modest — are likely to be scaled down over the next few months, and budget deficits are likely to get bigger. A fresh downturn could prove the death knell of the stability and growth pact, which would be no bad thing, and higher unemployment would intensify resistance among workers to structural reform of the eurozone economies.

Washington may have another reason — apart from getting its own back — for allowing the Europeans to suffer. The U.S. is desperate for the Chinese to revalue the yuan, but has so far utterly failed to get Beijing to agree to abandon its dollar peg. The Chinese, for political as well as economic reasons, are determined to resist American pressure.

Europe — the French, in particular — have influence in China. As one analyst noted last week, China has never been censured by the United Nations Security Council — even over the massacre in Tiananmen Square — because Paris has always vetoed any such moves. France, so the theory goes, might have more success in persuading the Chinese to revalue than the Americans have had.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that you would be hard-pressed to find a financial analyst who believes Snow is capable of this level of sophistication. After his performance in London last week, one said: “I would sell the currency of any country of which he was the finance minister.” The likelihood is that even if the Americans were to use the Europeans as a proxy, the Chinese would still resist. Certainly, all the evidence is that China’s central bank is still intervening aggressively to keep its currency stable. Without that action, the dollar’s fall in recent days would have been even more rapid.

Talking the dollar down is easy enough, but the strategy depends on a smooth descent that boosts U.S. growth without scaring off the overseas investors who fund the twin deficits. Should it turn into a disorderly rout, then there would inevitably be a spillover into other markets and into the real economy.

Washington, in other words, is relying on a soft landing for the dollar. History shows, however, that there is a better than even chance of this process ending in a full-scale crisis, as it did in the mid-1980s, when the weakness of the dollar culminated in the stock market crash of 1987. And that, of course, was at a time when the G-7 was acting in concert. As Lewis said, the crisis could be triggered by a seemingly minor event, as when the Nigerians precipitated the run on the pound in 1976 by switching into dollars.

The U.S. is happy to go it alone for now, since this is the Forex equivalent of the quick push to Baghdad. Life is likely to get tougher later — and when it does, multilateralism will have its attractions.