A third of the world's six billion people live in a state of extreme poverty, a state of 'brutal inequality' that mars the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations has said.

In a preview to a report on world population due out on Wednesday, the UN Population Fund representative in Mexico on Tuesday said, “One signal of the Gulf separating rich and poor is that while per capita income in 17 nations surpasses 20,000 dollars a year, inhabitants in 21 other nations subsist with less than 1,000 dollars a year.”

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At the far extreme of this scale lie Tanzania and Sierra Leone, with per capita income of less than 500 dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, are the super-rich nations of the United States, Switzerland, Norway and Singapore.

Alfonso Sandoval, the UN Population Fund representative in Mexico, told reporters that as of mid-2000, the earth's population was 6.055 billion people and growing at an annual rate of 1.3 percent. This translates into an addition of 76 million people, the number of inhabitants in Vietnam or the Philippines.

''It also means the net increase of 145 people per minute or 2.4 every second,'' said Sandoval.

Bureau Report