Today, at the midpoint toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), world leaders will gather in New York to see where more can be done to reach them by their deadline of 2015.

This is a critical moment as the prospects of a slowing global economy, high food and fuel prices and climate change threaten to derail and even reverse the progress already made.

Advances made toward the MDGs across the world have been varied. As the secretary-general's annual MDG report indicated this year, while significant gains were made on some fronts, the overall performance has been mixed. In particular, the benefits of growth have been unequally shared both across and within countries. This is particularly true for the Asia-Pacific region.

Asia's record of progress on the MDGs remains impressive although uneven. The remarkable growth figures from Asia, driven primarily by China and India, have no doubt helped lift millions out of poverty. Vietnam has surpassed the MDG poverty reduction goals of halving the number of people living below the poverty line and is planning to go even further beyond them by another 40 percent by 2010. Bangladesh is well on track with poverty down to 40 percent in 2005.

But in the recent months rising food and fuel prices have reversed some of these gains. East Asia is generally on track and South Asia is behind but is making progress on many goals. But looking at individual countries progress across the MDGs are disparate, with health and environmental sustainability being the slowest areas for progress.

One of the striking features of the growth story in the Asia-Pacific region is the increasing gap between countries – while the larger, rapidly growing economies like China and India have advanced by leaps and bounds, there is a widening gap between the faster growing economies and those being left behind – particularly the least-developed countries, landlocked nations and the small island developing states. Here countries are mostly off-track when it comes to meeting the MDGs.

Within well-performing countries too, particular regions and groups are falling behind. Rapid economic growth in these prospering countries has not automatically translated into tangible improvements for the majority of people, or directly improved the lot of those at the lowest rungs of society.

Inequalities are increasing dramatically, especially in the fast growing economies. This is painfully evident when we note that the indicators for maternal mortality have barely improved across the region, despite remarkable progress on economic indicators.

This is primarily because the benefits of Asia's growth have remained largely concentrated to its urban centers. Rural populations, who still comprise the majority of the region's people, have typically been bypassed.