Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, today told the World Economic Forum that the International Monetary Fund could help to finance debt relief to poor countries by selling or revaluing a portion of its gold reserves. "The first proposal of 2005 must be to deal with this historic problem of unpayable debt, the multi-lateral debt," Mr Brown said.

"I hope that other countries will support this, 100 per cent debt relief on multi-lateral debt, IMF debt, to be written off by revaluing or dealing with IMF gold through sales."

African countries owe the IMF, World Bank and the G8 industrialised nations hundreds of billions of dollars. Aid groups claim that debt repayments are crippling the countries they are working to help.

According to the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which lobbies for debt cancellation, poor countries around the world spend more than £30 million a day on debt repayments to rich countries for loans taken in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr Brown has called for debt to be written off through similar means in the past, but has never before aired the proposals on such a high-profile stage. So far the Chancellor has won little backing from the rest of the world. Some experts have commented that the plan would risk unbalancing the global gold market.

Under a 1971 agreement, most of the IMF's gold is valued at between $40 and $50 an ounce, about one-tenth of the current market price of more than $422 an ounce.

The IMF holds more than 100 million ounces of gold.

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Brown both travelled to Davos this week to use the event, which gathers together business and political leaders, to launch Britian's presidency of the G8 group of industrialised nations. Both men have sought to gain support for a plan of action to tackle poverty in Africa, dubbing 2005 a "make or break".

Mr Brown has called for a "New Marshall Plan", encompassing debt relief, increased aid and trade reform to help the continent.

Earlier this week he pledged almost £2.4 billion to combat poverty, including £1 billion to fund vaccines for children in the poorest countries. If other nations respond in similar fashion, five million lives could be saved between now and 2015, Mr Brown has said.

Mr Brown today said that public pressure for a global anti-poverty drive by rich countries could no longer be ignored. "I now sense in 2005 that hundreds, then thousands, then millions in every continent are coming together with such a set of insistent demands, that no government, no politician, no world leader can afford to ignore them," Mr Brown said ahead of his address to the Forum.

"I believe that by the end of the year that, in this year of opportunity, we will have the chance to make a real difference to the world."

The Chancellor made his comments as he joined France’s finance minister, Herve Gaymard, to receive a banner from pressure groups behind a campaign to press world leaders to halve poverty within ten years.

The broad group of non-governmental organisations issued their ambitious appeal for worldwide mobilization against poverty on the sidelines of the World Social Forum (WSF) in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre on Thursday.

"I believe that to build on that new commonsense that I see in every corner of the world, we must now make 2005 not just a year when we move discussion forward, but where action actually happens," Mr Brown said.

The issue would head the agenda at a meeting of the G8 finance ministers next week in London, he added, which former South African president Nelson Mandela would also attend.

Meanwhile, the former UN human rights chief Mary Robinson, who now heads the aid group Oxfam International, warned that anti-poverty policies existed but had been unfulfilled for many years. "What has been lacking is global political will," she said.

Three events this year will test whether the promises were being held, the former Irish president added.

They are the meeting of the G8 in July, a UN General Assembly that will review poverty-cutting targets for 2015, and the World Trade Organisation’s ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December on efforts to unlock markets to trade from poor countries.