GENEVA: The United Nations warned on Tuesday that poverty was set to worsen in the world’s poorest states unless economic growth became the top policy priority and rich states sharply boosted aid.
Far from meeting the internationally set goal of cutting extreme poverty by half by 2015, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said the number living on less than $1 a day in the world’s 49 poorest countries was set to jump 30 per cent by then to some 420 million, on current trends.
“No matter what poverty estimates are used, the least developed countries (LDCs) are not on track to meet the target,” UNCTAD said.
However, UNCTAD said in its Least Developed Countries Report 2002 that the situation could be dramatically improved for those countries, mostly in Africa, if domestic policy-makers and the international community adopted a single, simple goal — economic growth.
“If on the one hand the conclusions (of the report) are extremely worrying, on the other hand there is a way to dramatically reduce the level of extreme poverty if we can give priority to economic growth,” said UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero.
He said the report demonstrated that doubling the average household income through economic growth in the poorest states could have a dramatic impact on extreme poverty, cutting the percentage of those living on less than $1 a day to 20 percent from 65 per cent.
Even though agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had moved away from the rigid structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and the early 1990s, there were still too many conditions attached to their help, UNCTAD said.
CAUGHT IN TRAP: Whatever domestic policies were adopted, they would come to nothing without more foreign aid and a more determined effort by the international community to ensure that LDCs also benefited from globalization, UNCTAD said.
While foreign aid picked up towards the end of the 1990s, after dropping off sharply during the first part of the decade, it was still less than half the level of 1990 in per capita terms, UNCTAD said.
The UN agency has long argued for a doubling in international development assistance to the LDCs which stood at some $13.3 billion in 2000.
Sachs, a special adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, dismissed suggestions that putting the emphasis on better trade opportunities alone would resolve the problem.—Reuters