UNITED NATIONS - The world's wealthiest countries are reneging on promises to boost development aid, threatening U.N. targets for drastically reducing poverty by 2015, according to a new U.N. report released on Thursday.

The report on progress on the so-called Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) said there had been improvement in providing debt relief to the world's poorest countries but not when it came to fulfilling trade and development commitments.

Donors will need to increase their development assistance by $18 billion a year between now and 2010 if aid is to reach a target agreed at the 2005 Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the report said.

But even this would only bring development aid up to half the level the United Nations has set in its plan to halve the number of people in the world living on less than $1 a day.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who set up the task force that prepared the report, said it was a "wake-up call."

"It provides a valuable snapshot of where the global community is on track in fulfilling its commitments, and where we need to strengthen our efforts for the second half of the MDG timetable," he said.

The report confirms what aid agencies and individual U.N. officials have been saying for months -- that the world is in danger of failing to meet the U.N. development goals.

Kofi Annan, Ban's predecessor and the U.N. chief at the time the goals were approved in 2000, said that most progress made toward achieving the was in Asia.

"About 300 million people (there) have been lifted out of poverty because of their incredible economic growth," he told BBC radio. "There are countries in Africa that are doing well but but not every African country would meet the targets."

MILLIONS THROWN BACK INTO POVERTY

A European official briefing reporters on the MDGs said it was possible the poverty target might be achieved due to growth in China and India, but it would not be achieved in Africa.

According to some estimates, around 100 million people may have been pushed back into poverty by a food price increase over the past year, the official said.

Overall, donor countries have increased development aid since 2000, but in 2006 and 2007 assistance levels declined by 4.7 and 8.4 percent respectively, the report said.

It also described the collapse of the Doha round of global trade negotiations as a "major setback for developing countries seeking to benefit from expanding global trade opportunities in order to reduce poverty."

Ban told reporters that "the failure to conclude a development round constitutes the largest implementation gap. The world's poorest countries are still marginalized, and many have been hit hard by high food and energy prices."

The Doha round was launched in 2001 to meet the U.N. goal of establishing an "open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and nondiscriminatory multilateral trading and financial system."

The United Nations agreed on the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. In addition to reducing poverty and improving trade conditions, the goals focus on reducing child mortality, fighting diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and other problems that plague the developing world.

World leaders will discuss the U.N. development goals on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly later this month.