ISLAMABAD, Jan 26: Europe, the United States and Japan, by monopolizing global trade, have limited the growth of poor and least-developed countries.

The 23 poorest countries in the world have an unsustainable debt burden. Servicing debt swallows up foreign aid. Therefore, the foreign aid they receive cannot be used for development.

About 307 million people live on merely one dollar a day in these countries and the number can touch the figure of 420 million over the next 15 years, says a research titled 'Millennium Development Goals of Poverty Reduction in Relation to Trade Distorting Policies of the Rich Countries'.

The research had been carried out by Chairman, Agri Economics and Economics Department, University of Arid Agriculture, Sarfraz Ahmed and Senior Research Economist, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Mohammad Iqbal.

The research was presented in the recently held 20th annual general meeting and conference of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists (PSDE). Efforts of the poor and least-developed countries to combat poverty have been undermined by policies of north (rich) countries.

Trade restrictions imposed by rich countries are costing the poor nations $2.5 billion a year in lost foreign exchange earnings. There are very high tariffs in sectors most relevant to poor countries, the researchers observe.

Tariffs on some agriculture products are more than 300 per cent in European Union (EU) and, in case of groundnuts, over 100 per cent in the US despite the fact that a mere one per cent increase in share of world export by Africa, East and South Asia and Latin America could result in income rise that could lift 128 million people out of the maze of poverty.

The problem is that when poor countries finally threw away the yoke of colonialism, they found that their economies depended on exporting very few products to the western developed countries," the researchers say.

About 70 per cent of the world's poor live in the rural areas and depended on agriculture, while two-thirds of global agriculture trade originates in rich countries which resulted in a net flow of resources from the poor to rich countries, they observe.

The paper observes that as millions of people are becoming uprooted and suffer from dislocations occasioned by increasing globalization and interdependence of world economy, rich countries are going ahead with imposing more restrictive immigration controls.