CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico (AP) - Pacific Rim leaders headed home Monday with commitments to reduce poverty with trade, saying jobs and education are among their best weapons in the global fight against terrorism.

A year after condemning the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and launching a global campaign against terror, top officials from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum acknowledged Sunday that they need to do more.

Mexican President Vicente Fox said that unlike last year's APEC resolution, which strongly condemned terrorism, leaders this year set deadlines for the security measures they recommended and came up with ways to make sure countries comply. He said the threat of terrorism still is strong.

"It is creating poverty. It is creating more unemployment. It is preventing us from achieving the healthy goals our economies have," he said. "So this is a strong and radical stand against terrorism."

APEC leaders called on North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. They said the economic benefits from the communist country's growing ties in the region depended on it.

The summit's declaration said nothing about Iraq despite President Bush's efforts to get his fellow APEC members to support U.S. threats of war against Saddam Hussein if he balks at U.N. inspection efforts to uncover forbidden weapons in his arsenal.

The meeting also was overshadowed by terrorist attacks in the Philippines and Indonesia and a hostage crisis in Moscow that forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to cancel his trip.

APEC leaders condemned the "mass slaughter of the innocent" on the Indonesian island of Bali, where 191 people were killed by a bomb that exploded Oct. 12. They said the attack "reminds us of terrorism's brutality and the global imperative to oppose and fight this threat wherever it may be found."

Fox announced the resolution at a $700-a-night hotel in this Mexican sport-fishing and golf resort. He was surrounded by his counterparts from around the world, men wearing white guayabera shirts and the three female leaders in colorfully embroidered blouses called huipiles.

The leaders endorsed a U.S.-crafted proposal to tighten security on millions of shipping containers, fortify cockpit doors in airliners and strengthen cooperation among customs and immigration officials.

The declaration called on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to assess countries' efforts to stop the flow of money to terrorists, and offer assistance to countries needing it.

Although supportive of the measures, many poor nations worry they will not have the money or training to carry out the initiatives in time. The declaration said common standards would be put into place by 2005 "whenever possible."

It also called for the abolition of agricultural subsidies in the United States, Europe and Japan that were widely criticized by developing nations and others at the summit.

APEC, created in 1989 to promote free trade among economies of the Pacific Rim, has increasingly found itself wrangling with political issues.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung all agreed in weekend meetings with Bush that North Korea must be free of nuclear weapons. Their language, however, was not as forceful as some U.S. officials hoped.

"While cooperating closely with other nations, we will push North Korea to end concerns about the nuclear problem," Koizumi said Sunday.

Bush also could not sway doubtful U.N. Security Council members on his proposal to threaten Iraq with war if it does not disarm.

France, Russia, Mexico and other allies have tried to water down the United States' hard-line approach to Iraq, and Bush administration officials have acknowledged that a strong U.N. resolution to force Saddam Hussein to disarm his biological, chemical and nuclear arsenals may elude them this week.

Although the fight against terrorism continued to be the focus of the APEC summit, leaders declared resoundingly that tighter security should not derail free trade efforts. They promised to "maximize political support for the pursuit of free and open trade and investment."

But Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien expressed doubt that this year's meeting, like last year's in Shanghai, China, would be successful in undermining future attacks.

"It's not because we have a declaration in Shanghai that terrorism is going to disappear," he said, adding, "Now it's coming from anywhere. It's completely unpredictable."