July 25, 2002	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 14,1423

UNITED NATIONS, July 24: The emerging democracies in many countries could be undermined if they are not followed with a parallel economic growth and could slip back into authoritarian rule, according to the UNDP Human Development report released on Wednesday.

The report said although scores of countries took steps towards democracy during the 1980s and 1990s, progress in many is stalled and some are slipping back to authoritarian rule putting human development at risk.

The report found, new democratic hopes unmet by elected governments, lead to public disgust for the system and regression to military rule.

The example of Pakistan, is often cited, where corrupt and inefficient elected governments in the 1990s were exposed and hammered by a free press. One result was little public opposition to the takeover of government by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999.

The report, entitled “Deepening democracy in a fragmented world,” was launched on Wednesday by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and UNDP administrator Mark Malloch Brown at the Presidential Palace in Manila.

Josi Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace laureate and Foreign Minister of newly-independent East Timor spoke at a luncheon following the launch.

While 140 of the world’s nearly 200 countries hold multi-party elections, only 82 are fully democratic, with institutions such as a free press and independent judiciary. The report calls for a new wave of democracy-building to give ordinary people a greater say in both national and global policy-making.

“The central message of this report is a simple one: to promote human development successfully we need to put the politics back into poverty eradication,” said Malloch Brown.

“That means ensuring that the poor have a real political voice and access to strong, transparent institutions capable of providing them with the kind of personal security, access to justice, and services from health to education they so desperately need,” he pointed out.

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Director of the UNDP and lead author of the report, said: “Having the means and the freedom to fight for one’s rights, to shape decisions about the future of one’s own community, to gain access to crucial information and markets — in short, having a choice in life, is at the core of human empowerment.”

Most parts of the world may have made progress in human development, but 21 countries registered a decline in the Human Development Index, based on life expectancy, education and income per person, during the 1990s.

Fully 52 countries ended the decade poorer than at its beginning, and though the number of people living in extreme poverty was nearly halved in Asia, it grew in all other regions, jeopardizing countries’ progress towards the Millennium Development Goal of halving severe poverty by 2015.

The report ranks countries by quality of life, based largely on life expectancy, education and personal incomes. This year Norway ranks first, as it did last year, followed by Sweden, Canada, Belgium, Australia and the United States.

The countries at the bottom of the index are all sub-Saharan African. Sierra Leone, where life expectancy stands at barely 39 years, is worst, followed by Niger, Burundi, Mozambique and Burkina Faso

The report said that aid to developing countries fell during the decade, and for Africa it was halved, dropping from $39 to $19 per person annually.

Donor countries continued to subsidize their farmers at a rate of one billion dollars a day, more than six times their total aid to poor countries, flooding markets with cheap imports and squeezing out poor country farmers.

The number of refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide grew by 50 per cent. These trends are “deeply troubling,” said Ms Fukuda-Parr.

“All this adds up to a world in urgent need of a political order that can achieve greater inclusion, an order in which all people and countries can have a say in decisions that affect their future, and one with rules and institutions which command trust among all people and countries.”