World needs new multilateral system: Zoellick

The global financial crisis underscores the need for coordinated action to build a better multilateral system, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said Sunday.
"We need to modernize multilateralism for a new global economy," Zoellick said at a news conference in Washington. "We need concerted action now to ... build a better system for the future."
Zoellick spoke on day two of annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, overshadowed this year by the global financial crisis that erupted in August 2007, evolving into the worst of its kind since the Great Depression.
Developing countries complained at the World Bank gathering Sunday that the crisis will put their recent hard-won economic gains at risk while rich nations dwell exclusively on their own problems.
With donor aid programs under pressure due to the financial crisis, the World Bank estimates that up to 100 hundred million people are at risk of falling into poverty because of higher food and energy prices.