If New Orleans was best known for the wailing of the blues from its saxophones and clarinets, Katrina is now like a bugle call to the rest of us to take note of the poverty in our society to which we may have hitherto been blind. How can it be that in a nation so strong and prosperous, pockets of such human anguish remain?

It is not an American problem alone. It is global. Even as evacuees by the hundreds continued to be flown or bused away from the stricken Gulf shores, a U.N. report called for more aggressive action in combating the poverty that exists worldwide.

The United Nations faulted wealthy countries like the United States and Japan for not doing enough to achieve goals set to halve extreme poverty and reduce deaths of children by two-thirds by 2015. The United States, it said, trumpets the virtues of open markets and free trade, but throws up protectionist barriers against goods from poor countries. It spends "hundreds of billions" of dollars on subsidies that benefit U.S. large-scale farmers, land owners and agribusinesses.

The U.N. report says the United States will pay $4.7 billion to 20,000 cotton farmers in 2005, more than the total of American aid to Africa, a policy that gives American producers an unfair advantage over small farmers in Burkina Faso and Mali. "Industrial countries are locked into a system that wastes money at home and destroys livelihoods abroad," the United Nations charges.

But it also rebuked India (with 2.5 million "easily preventable" child deaths a year) and China (with 730,000 preventable child deaths a year) for not doing more to tackle their problems, even as their economies are surging.

Eliminating world poverty is not only an objective to be pursued for altruistic reasons. As we can see in the Middle East, it is one of the prime breeding grounds for the next generation of terrorists the Western world has vowed to defeat.

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John Hughes is editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret Morning News. He is a former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, which syndicates this column. E-mail: hughes@desnews.com