Antonio Banderas Takes Aim at Poverty for the United Nations

Nearly a decade after Original Sin was released, the movie can now say it has not one, but two official Goodwill Ambassadors in its cast. That's because Antonio Banderas has joined Angelina Jolie in that honorable role after being named by the United Nations as a Goodwill Ambassador for the fight against poverty.

According to the United Nations release, the Spanish-born actor, who will soon appear in his first Woody Allen movie, will be focusing on the Millennium Development Goals, "a set of eight globally agreed targets that seek to halve world poverty by 2015 by combating hunger, disease, literacy, environment degradation and discrimination against women." While it may be a lofty goal, it has to start somewhere, and having a celebrity like Banderas behind it can only help bring more attention to the areas of concern.

As the actor was quoted as saying, "Poverty robs us of our potential as a people, preventing us from being all that we can be. This is why it is so important to mobilize all of our efforts to defeat it, especially if today we have the knowledge, the tools and the resources to do it."

And, let's face it, he's right. We do have the knowledge, the tools and the resources. We just need to make the effort.

Photo by Petr Novák, Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons.