A woman in sub-Saharan Africa will be among up to 90 million people forced into extreme poverty in 2009. A baby in South Asia will be one of 400,000 to die this year. And a man in Latin America will join the 1 billion chronically hungry people in the world. The anonymity of such staggering statistics can obscure the human costs of poverty, deprivation and disease.
But a stark reminder came Friday from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. In their Global Monitoring Report, the international lenders warned that the widening global financial crisis has created a development emergency, preventing many countries from achieving aims on reducing hunger, child mortality and major diseases.
"The triple jeopardy of the food, fuel and financial crises is pushing many poor countries into a danger zone, imposing rising human costs and imperilling development prospects," the report said, noting that it was unlikely that the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would be met by the target year of 2015.
In addition to reducing poverty, the MDGs - an ambitious programme adopted by governments in 2000 - call for halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, ensuring gender equality, providing universal primary education to all children, ending maternal and child mortality and stopping environmental degradation. According to the latest estimates, an additional 55 to 90 million people will be trapped in extreme poverty - defined as those who live on less than 1.25 dollars a day - in 2009 because of the global recession.
The number of chronically hungry people is expected to climb this year to more than 1 billion, or about one-sixth of the world's population, reversing recent gains in fighting malnutrition, the report said. Developing countries will be particularly hard hit as exports contract, commodity prices fluctuate wildly and remittances and foreign investment shrink, with growth in emerging economies expected to fall to 1.6 per cent in 2009, from an average of 8.1 per cent in 2006-07, according to new IMF projections.
"Foreign aid to poor countries stands at 120 billion dollars - nowhere near enough, and a drop in the ocean compared to the 8.4 trillion dollars recently mobilised to prop up ailing banks," said Bernice Romero of humanitarian aid group Oxfam. "Poor people need a bail-out of their own." That crisis for the poor comes as finance ministers and central bank heads from around the world gathered this weekend in Washington for semi-annual meetings of IMF and World Bank members.
All corners of the globe are feeling the pinch, especially developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as a financial crisis that originated in the United States has engulfed many of the world's banks and wider economies. The crisis is overturning solid progress made in regions like Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where investment from Western Europe has dried up and many banks are teetering on the brink.
About 35 million people from those regions could be plunged back into poverty this year, one third of those who had escaped since 1999, the World Bank said. "With simultaneous recessions striking all major regions, the likelihood of painfully slow recoveries in many countries is very real, making the fight against poverty more challenging and more urgent," IMF deputy managing director John Lipsky warned.
While officials from the seven leading industrial economies on Friday promised more measures to prop up their struggling financial sectors, ministers from developing countries complained that they were bearing the brunt of a crisis that began elsewhere. Adib Magaleh, governor of Syria's central bank and chair of a developing country bloc known as the Group of 24, said that poor countries were now asking for help "to attempt to remedy problems, which they did not commit."
World Bank President Robert Zoellick on Thursday boosted the bank's own social projects on infrastructure, health and education and said that wealthier nations must take steps to protect the poor and follow up on their commitments to low income countries.
With millions set to lose their jobs in 2009, the report said that increased spending in the private sector would alleviate some of the negative impact on the poor.
At the end of the Group of 20 (G20) summit earlier this month in London, world leaders pledged to find "a global solution to a global crisis" by repairing the financial system, restoring lending, promoting global trade and rejecting protectionism. The core of that effort involves a more than 1-trillion-dollar boost in funding to the IMF, World Bank and other development banks, which provide loans to governments that are facing massive budget shortfalls during the global recession.
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