[Global Poverty] 50 Countries, 700 Million People, One Poverty Trap

Anja Tranovich

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 15 (IPS) - A new U.N. report calls for urgent action to combat the dual crises of poverty and AIDS in Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

The report, ”Hoping and Coping, The Capacity Challenge of HIV/AIDS in Least Developed Countries”, issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS) on Jul. 12, details the effects of AIDS on LDC economies.

”This call for action sets out the plight of the nations that are bearing the brunt of the worst epidemic in human history while having the least capacity to deal with the immense challenges it presents,” says Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a preface to the report.

The LDCs, a U.N. marker of lowest economic development, suffer from extreme poverty and have some of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world. Sixteen out of the 50 LDCs have an HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate of higher than four percent, and for others, the prevalence rate is much higher. In Lesotho (an LDC), the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate among adults is 28.9 percent. For the 700 million people in Least Developed Countries, the epidemic is an economic and social issue as well as a health crisis.

The report suggests that HIV/AIDS erodes individual and institutional capacities so acutely because HIV/AIDS affects people in the prime of life. Felipe Chidumo, the ambassador of Mozambique, said that, ”for economic growth, strengthening of human capacity is essential.” The report refers to human capacity as, ”the ability to achieve higher levels of returns in economic and social development.”

Already disadvantaged sectors of the population disproportionately bear the burden of AIDS in LDCs. Women, for example, contract the disease more easily than men for both biological and social reasons. At the 15th annual AIDS conference in Bangkok, Annan noted that, ”Among people younger than 24 in sub-Saharan Africa, girls and young women make up nearly two-thirds of those living with HIV, and yet one-third of all countries still have no policies to ensure that women have access to prevention and care.”

In Uganda, an LDC, women produce 75 percent of the country's food and make up 80 percent of the agricultural workforce. When AIDS disproportionately affects women, food production also suffers. Similarly, migrant mine workers in LDCs like Burkina Faso and Togo are at high risk for the virus. Agriculture and mining are two of the largest sectors of many LDC's economies.

The report advocates for policies that support women's empowerment and for extending public services to migrants. In South Africa, migrant mine workers are two and a half times more likely to be HIV positive than non-migrant mine workers, according to a U.N. report published in February. For many LDCs, an unsustainable debt burden also contributes heavily to the joint problem of poverty and AIDS. Debt servicing in some LDCs such as Senegal, Malawi and Sao Tome absorbs around 30 percent of the public income. ”Heavily indebted countries are asked to make a choice between addressing their debt and addressing the health of their populations,” noted Anwarul K. Chowdhury, the U.N. under-secretary-general.

The problems facing LDCs impede progress on U.N. development targets such as the Brussels Programme for Action for LDCs, launched in 2001, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; environmental sustainability; and reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, all by 2015.

The epidemic has actually reversed some markers of development. Life expectancy, for example, had shown positive trends, rising to 50 years in some LDCs. But since the onset of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, life expectancy has fallen to 39 years old in some LDCs. Mark Malloch Brown, the UNDP administrator, notes that, ”Halting and reversing the course of HIV/AIDS, the sixth Millennium Development Goal, is not possible if we continue business as usual.” ”It requires an intensified multi-sectoral approach that promotes leadership at all levels of society and helps break the silence once and for all by permanently altering the norms, values and attitudes fueling the epidemic,” he said.

Joseph Annan, a senior policy advisor at UNDP, echoed Brown's call for a comprehensive approach to the multifaceted problems that LDCs like Ethiopia face. Ethiopia has an HIV infection rate of 4.4 percent, compounded by drought that has caused nearly half of the population to be at risk of food insecurity. Ethiopia also faces problems of emigration of its skilled workforce. Addis Ababa University reports that up to half of the staff members who went abroad for postgraduate studies never returned. Problems of emigration, loss of skilled workers and educators, AIDS and natural disasters are endemic to many of the LDCs, and the report recommends responses from all levels: the private sector, governments and regional assistance.

However, LDCs cannot go it alone. The report advocates for aid from developed countries, recommending that official development assistance be earmarked for capacity development in LDCs. ”Targeted interventions can enable many to break out of the poverty trap,” it says. The call for development assistance from wealthier countries is one of the 10 action points, as LDCs by definition lack the resources to implement some of the economic and social policies that the report suggests are needed to battle AIDS and poverty.

Amid the bleak statistics, there are some positive signs. A 2004 MDG report on Ethiopia stated, ”there is sufficient hope for Ethiopia to attain the goal of halving poverty by 2015 if it commits to a growth path that is broad-based and pro-poor in line with its current development strategies.”

http://www.ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=29517

[Asia] Extreme poverty gives rise to modern-day slavery

Web posted at: 7/16/2005 2:18:23
Source: Reuters

SURAJBAR JOT, India: Joloy Sori Mallik doesn’t question her 16-year-old daughter too closely about the time she was drugged and kidnapped by strangers near her north Indian village.

“Whatever she tells me, I believe,” she says, squatting on the dirt floor of her verandah, in front of a mudwashed wall with a childish outline of a heart and arrow painted by her daughter, Sunita.

Sunita and her 30-year-old sister-in-law, Urmila, were kidnapped a few months ago by two Nepali men posing as lawyers helping her brother, who was in jail for timber smuggling.

They come from a tiny, closeknit Indo-Mongoloid tribe known as the Dhimal, who live in what they call the “Land of the Sun” in eastern India near Nepal.

Their version is that they escaped soon after finding themselves in the city of Pune, near Mumbai, the nation’s financial and entertainment capital, after being held for a brief time.

They say they later worked as servants for a local Nepali family to raise the money to come home.

But their story has many holes, including how they escaped so easily and how they found a friendly family in a strange city.

What goes unsaid among this tribe of barely 900 with little knowledge of the outside world is that they were victims of people traffickers feeding India’s brothels.

“We are not asking about it too much, because it is a matter of shame and embarrassment,” says schoolteacher and tribal leader Garjan Kumar Mallik, who helped bring the women back. “We don’t have things like prostitution in our society and it’s hard for people to believe this.”

Although the women have been accepted back by the tribe, they have moved to a nearby town, ostensibly in search of work.

The United States, which has put India on a watch list for failing to combat people trafficking, says this is the world’s third-largest source of money for organised crime after drugs and weapons.

The State Department says it is also the fastest growing crime, with 600,000-800,000 men, women and children trafficked every year.

“Human trafficking is nothing less than modern-day slavery,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently. “Whatever form of cruel servitude it may take, trafficking victims live in fear and in misery.”

Neighbouring Nepal is a major source of trafficked women and children, many smuggled across the porous border just a few kilometres (miles) away from Surajbar Jot.

The Dhimal are mainly subsistence farmers, animists who worship the jungle and rivers around them. They live in crude bamboo huts in an area still menaced by wild elephants searching for food and the local haria rice wine.

Joloy was with Sunita and Urmila the day they were taken.

The fake lawyers took the three to a tea stall. Then they said they needed the younger women to sign some documents to free Joloy’s son, Chaupal, and took them away.

“I had only 4 rupees (9 cents) on me,” she says. “I spent it all in the tea shop and still they never came back and that really got me worried.” Eventually, the two women got word back to their family or were found by people sent to look for them. How is unclear.

“I felt really good when they came back,” Joloy says. “I couldn’t work, I couldn’t do anything when they were gone. They were very weak when they came back.” As she tells her tale, the tough-spirited Joloy, who thinks she is about 50, is dressed in a single piece of fabric, wrapped around her like a bathtowel.

[MDGs] Hall-of-mirrors view puts anti-poverty goals on the map

14 Jul 2005

LONDON (AlertNet)

A Dutch organisation has come up with a novel way to put the Millennium Development Goals for slashing global poverty on the map – by showing how the world would look if countries were sized in proportion to various development indicators.

Call it the hall-of-mirrors approach to cartography. View rich countries in terms of aid given as a percentage of gross national income, and the United States looks wizened and tiny. Look at the world in terms of HIV/AIDS rates, and sub-Saharan Africa swells like a balloon.

The maps were created by Mapping Worlds, a Dutch organisation founded by the Dutch National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development.

The group aims to raise global awareness of development-related issues through innovative cartography and has come up with hall-of-mirror maps for all eight of the U.N.-sponsored Millennium Development Goals aimed at cutting poverty and improving education and health over the next 10 years.

The series shows countries distorted in proportion to development aid, debt, education rates, gender equality, child mortality and HIV/AIDS, while other maps on the website focus on migration and people displaced in and around western Sudan.

Original article : http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/112135734160.htm

The maps can be viewed here : http://www.mappingworlds.nl/milldevgoals.html

[Fair Trade] Fair trade tests G8 goodwill on Africa

10 July 2005

By Brian Love

GLENEAGLES: When the ink dried on G8 pledges to double aid for Africa, what was missing was a commitment to make life viable for cotton farmers and fishermen who are hurt by heavily subsidised US and European rivals.

Economic self-interest took a back seat when Group of Eight leaders signed off on debt relief and an extra $50 billion per year for under-developed regions at the Gleneagles golf resort in Scotland on July 8, half of it for Africa. But the goodwill faded when the eight men were asked to stop government support for exports of farm produce so that needier countries can compete on a more even footing in world markets.

In Geneva, the head of the World Trade Organisation said at the same time that long-running negotiations among close to 150 countries on broad liberalisation of trade in agricultural and manufactured goods and services were in crisis. Aid agencies were quick to point out that more market access and fairer trade was what Africa needed most but was least likely to get any time soon."Despite word games in Gleneagles, in ongoing trade talks in Geneva the US and EU are still pushing to retain subsidies by another name," ActionAid, a non-government development agency, said.

OLD RIVALRIES

The friction between Europe and the United States was almost palpable after British Prime Minister Tony Blair proposed that G8 countries set a 2010 deadline for halting export subsidies. The proposal was shelved and an official communique said the G8 leaders were instead ready to work towards that goal "by a credible end date". That did not stop big players such as the United States and the Europeans, the big subsidisers along with Japan, competing with offers of an end to farm aid, offers that analysts said were either too conditional or too vague to be meaningful.
US President George W Bush said his country was ready to work with the 25-nation European Union on abolition of farm aid and that this might be doable by 2010.French President Jacques Chirac said the EU had offered as much last year with no response from Washington and that Bush was making pledinside the summit rooms of the Gleneagles hotel.Indeed, Chirac said bluntly that no date would be set unless it was part of a broader package on trade in goods and services among nearly 150 countries involved in the so-called Doha Round of negotiations that are in trouble at WTO headquarters in Geneva.

The next big test of whether the rich G8 countries are serious about satisfying demands for more access to their markets and fairer trade with Africa comes in December in Hong Kong, when ministers will push for completion of the Doha Round free trade deal. For now, there are plenty of other problems to contend with, such as a feud between Europe and the United States over aid to Airbus and Boeing, or threats by US Congressmen to block surging Chinese exports of clothes and textiles.

COTTON ON

Helping Africa help itself means striking long-elusive deals on things like trade in cotton. 10 million farmers in West Africa suffer because of US subsidies despite producing cotton for a third of the US price, a recent report highlighted.

Subsidised fishing boats from the EU often catch more fish off African shores than local vessels, while African fish exports to the EU are limited, according to the report by the Commission for Africa, a group advising Blair and G8 leaders.Irish rock star Bono, one of the figureheads of a campaign to rid Africa of poverty, met G8 leaders to congratulate them for raising aid, but also to make the point that fair trade was vital for Africa to fend for itself.
"Everyone wants the fishermen, not the fish," he said.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L10580849.htm