Life is Healthy

A woman cleaning her child in a North Jakarta slum. According to the city’s Public Works Office data, 70 percent of the country is forced to wash in contaminated water. (Photo: Afriadi Hikmal, JG)

Manila. Seventeen million Asians have fallen into extreme poverty due to the global financial crisis, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations said on Wednesday.

And another 4 million could this year slip into the same situation due to the effects of the slump, officials from the two organizations said launching a joint report on poverty alleviation here.

This is on top of the 900 million people in Asia who are already living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.25 a day.

Asia had shown great progress in bringing people out of poverty in recent years, ADB vice president Ursula Schaefer-Preuss said. “But gains are being reversed due to the economic crisis,” she said.

UN Under-Secretary General Noeleen Heyzer said that people in the export and tourism sectors in Asia had lost and were still losing their jobs due to the crisis, which swept across the globe in late 2008.

Less foreign investment, aid and remittances from overseas workers were further hurting Asia’s poor, Heyzer said.

The report said more women, who form the majority of Asia’s low-skilled and temporary workforce, than men had been forced back into extreme poverty due to the crisis.

UN Assistant Secretary General Ajay Chhibber said the Asia-Pacific was doing quite well in areas such as infrastructure in achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals that are aimed at bringing people out of poverty.

“But it lags woefully behind in social issues,” he said.

Even Latin America and Eastern Europe had better “social protections” than Asia such as pensions and unemployment insurance, Chhibber said.

Only 2 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product in Asia goes to such social protections, he said, adding that this figure should ideally be 4 percent to 6 percent.

This meant large numbers of Asians could fall back into poverty during the crisis or even during natural disasters, he said.

The report said the could protect itself from future crises though regional cooperation. “Regional cooperation would also be particularly valuable for the trade in food, and could include grain banks that are maintained in each country but readily accessible to others.”

Expanding Asian “monetary and financial coordination would be particularly useful to reduce external shocks such as with the global financial crisis.

Asian nations could consider diversifying their export markets to become less dependent on demand from the West, the joint report advised.

“By lowering trade barriers and creating more opportunity for the Asia-Pacific region to invest within itself, there can be a greater insulation against such crisis in the future.”

JG, AFP