By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 13 2006 (IPS)

Fans in football stadiums, parks and city squares in Latin American countries will stand up this weekend in support of a global campaign against poverty.

The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) wants to set an official Guinness World Record for the greatest number of people ever to Stand Up Against Poverty, through events organised around the world.

GCAP&#39s month of global action kicked off Sept. 16 and will culminate on Tuesday Oct.17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 220 million of the total regional population of 500 million people are poor. And although according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the region produces four times the amount of food needed to feed the population, 58 million people are malnourished.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be discussed in nine first-division football games Saturday and Sunday in Mexico, and the public will be asked to stand up for several minutes, Paul Hoeffel, director of the U.N. information centre for Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, told IPS.

U.N. agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are carrying out campaigns to raise awareness on the MDGs, which were adopted by the international community at the Millennium Summit in 2000.

Several universities and schools – including a yoga institute – in Mexico are also organising events for the weekend, during which everyone will stand up against poverty, while NGOs will hold gatherings in parks.

Much farther to the south, in Uruguay, a huge banner will be unfurled by activists in the Centenario stadium in Montevideo, reading "Stand Up – the Main Rival Is Poverty", a few minutes before the start of the match between the Liverpool and Cerrito clubs, with the acquiescence of the Uruguayan Football Association.

The Uruguayan coalition Women for Democracy, Equity and Citizenship, which is organising the demonstration, underscored that 31 percent of the population of 3.2 million, and 56 percent of children under five, live below the poverty line.

In Argentina, personalities from the worlds of art and culture, academia and the human rights community agreed to meet monthly to monitor progress towards the MDGs in seminars and debates, and are promoting events ranging from a contest on posters on the fight against poverty to the creation of a parliamentary working group on the MDGs.

In Colombia, President Álvaro Uribe will take part in a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, which will include the presentation of an official strategy to reduce poverty and inequality, drafted by a team of researchers headed by academics Hugo López and Jairo Núñez.

The event, convened by the U.N. Development Fund (UNDP), will also be attended by representatives of the local NGO Profamilia, which specialises in sexual and reproductive health, and of multilateral lending agencies like the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank.

In El Salvador, several municipal governments will host demonstrations by farmers and other local residents in the main squares of their towns from 9:00 to 11:00 AM on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Claudia Hernández of the Association for Economic Development and Social Progress told IPS.

The gatherings will be aimed at "reflecting on the problem of poverty in El Salvador" and sharing anti-poverty initiatives. Then everyone will stand up, waving small white flags, a symbol of the global campaign in which they will join hundreds of thousands of people around the world standing up against poverty.

According to the UNDP, 43 percent of Salvadorans live in poverty, on an income of two dollars a day, and 19 percent in extreme poverty, scraping by on just a dollar a day.

In Nicaragua, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty will be commemorated Tuesday with a central rally that will form part of a series of activities, said Georgina Muñoz, with the non-governmental Coordinadora Civil, the national chapter of GCAP.

The events will include a public statement in support of World Food Day, which is celebrated Oct. 16, with a call to all sectors of society to join forces in the fight against hunger and to achieve food security for all.

"The Alliance Against Hunger, as the principal expression of poverty, is the Nicaraguan strategy to achieve the first MDG," said Muñoz.

On Tuesday, dozens of activists will take to the streets of the capital, Managua, with the goal of collecting 20,000 signatures on a petition urging the government to resist the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and put a higher priority on social spending.

>From its regional headquarters in Santiago, Chile, FAO will organise a videoconference linking up organisations and experts from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala and Peru to discuss the Hunger-Free Latin America by 2025 initiative, which essentially proposes the coordination of efforts to make the fight against hunger a top priority on public agendas in the region.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oct. 17 will be celebrated with an event involving graffiti painting, dance, rap and hip hop, organised by the Landless Workers&#39 Movement (MST), which sees youngsters from urban slum areas as a social force capable of transforming the country.

Other events will be held in different state capitals, including parties and debates on the MDGs Sunday and Monday in schools in the southern city of Porto Alegre.

Brazilian NGOs involved in GCAP are organising events to draw attention to and raise awareness on the different aspects of combating poverty, such as the fight against AIDS, the need to increase foreign aid, and the need to guarantee fair trade, Jair Barbosa, with the non-governmental Institute of Socioeconomic Studies, which is coordinating the GCAP activities in Brazil, told IPS.

* With additional reporting by Diego Cevallos (Mexico), José Adán Silva (Nicaragua), Helda Martínez (Colombia), Mario Osava (Brasil), Raúl Gutiérrez (El Salvador), Marcela Valente (Argentina) and Ángela Castellanos (Uruguay).

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