Nations Convene for Global Summit on Fighting Poverty : Diplomacy: Meeting is expected to be largest gathering of world leaders in U.N. history. Critics say its cost should go to needy.

In what is being billed as the largest gathering of world leaders in U.N. history, about 20,000 delegates from 180 countries converged Sunday on Copenhagen for what promises to be a weeklong wrangle over the best ways to fight poverty.

“Absolute poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy are the lot of one-fifth of the world’s population,” U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said. “There can be no more urgent task for development than to attack both the causes and the symptoms of these ills.”

Even as delegates were arriving for the United Nations’ World Summit for Social Development, however, some non-governmental anti-poverty groups were arguing that the whole thing should be canceled and the costs of staging it devoted directly to helping the poor.

“They should save everybody’s time and money by calling off the summit and investing that time and money in trying to reduce the obscene gap between the world’s haves and have-nots,” said Nigel Twose, international director of the British charity ActionAid.

Among the participants in the summit, which opens today, will be an expected 116 heads of state and government, even more than the 108 national leaders who attended the United Nations’ huge Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Lower-ranking delegates to Copenhagen range from Ethiopian and Mozambican officials too impoverished to pay for their own plane tickets (the Danish government discreetly put up the funds) to Sheik Zayed ibn Sultan al Nuhayan of the United Arab Emirates, who reportedly spent about $150,000 just to refurbish the villa he rented for the anti-poverty proceedings.

Significantly absent this week will be the leaders of some wealthy nations--President Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major, for instance--who disappointed the organizers by choosing to stay away and sending representatives instead. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin also canceled plans to attend, citing the fighting in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Holding a summit without such key world players “is like playing ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince of Denmark,” complained Mahbub Haq, U.N. Development Program special adviser.

Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to attend the summit, and the British government has sent a junior Cabinet minister.

Over the course of the week, the delegates are to discuss a 10-point declaration that will include a commitment to “eradicate poverty in the world”--an impossibly vast proposition that suggests many different approaches to many different nations.

Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations, Juan Somavia, echoed the wishes of many cash-strapped nations over the weekend by saying he hopes that debt relief will be high on the week’s agenda--a view U.S. delegates crisply oppose.

Mahbub, a Yale-educated economist and former Pakistani finance minister, is meanwhile promoting the “20-20 formula,” by which donor countries would earmark 20% of their foreign aid packages for health and education while recipient nations would spend 20% of their budgets on basic human needs.

Wealthy nations such as Germany have retorted that the 20-20 idea will not work because recipient countries have shown themselves unwilling to accept foreign controls on their national budgets. Germany, for its part, wants to set up an international fund to fight child labor.

Aside from the questions of debt relief and direct foreign aid, other anti-poverty topics up for discussion include improving trading terms for poor countries; studying job-creation techniques; enforcing the International Labor Organization’s ban on child labor, and looking at the particular needs of Africa as the world’s poorest continent.

But outside the suburban Copenhagen convention center where the summit is being held, there is widespread doubt that yet another global meeting can do much to reverse centuries of misery in the world’s so-called south.

One recent Danish poll suggested that a mere 15% of the host country’s citizens believe that the summit will contribute to any reduction in poverty. Twice as many respondents said they think the summit will raise false expectations, and 2% even said they think it might worsen poverty.

In the United States, foreign aid has been under direct attack as a “rat hole” for U.S. dollars, in the expression of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. The Republican-dominated Congress wants to cut foreign aid, which now stands at about $13 billion a year--including military assistance--or about 1% of the federal budget.

Polls show that Americans have wildly inflated ideas about development aid. A recent Harris Poll suggested that Americans think Washington sends 20% of the budget overseas.

Then too, the foreign aid that once flowed into developing nations from the former Soviet Union and its satellites has dried up with the collapse of that empire. The World Bank’s lending has also been reduced as payments from its creditor countries have gone down.

“Anyone who expects magic formulas from this conference has failed to recognize the dimension of its task,” warned Norbert Bluem, Germany’s labor minister.

Given these conditions, the summit’s most realistic goal may simply be to attract attention to the condition of the world rather than to find any mutually agreeable solutions. According to the United Nations:

* Up to 18 million people die each year because of poverty. Since 1992, pneumonia and diarrhea alone have killed 6 million children under age 5.

* There are about 100 million homeless “street children” in the world.

* One of every 10 working-age people in the world is unemployed.

* The debts of developing countries have doubled in the last 10 years.

* Over the last 10 years, between 80 million and 90 million people have been displaced by programs intended to improve infrastructure, such as dams, ports and roads.

“Resources and means are available to eliminate the worst aspects of world poverty,” said James Speth, head of the U.N. Development Program. “What has been lacking is the will. This summit is a big step in mustering that will.”