UNDP report pinpoints challenges facing Arabs

By Patrick Galey

Daily Star staff

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

BEIRUT: The team of writers and academics who compiled the fifth United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report, launched this week in Beirut, has clearly done its homework. It’s now down to the leaders of the Arab world to learn the lesson.

The “Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries” proffers recommendations on how to implement lasting stability in the Arab region. These include advice on how to counteract environmental, social, economic and military flashpoints which the area, populated by its mélange of races, religions and rifts, seems prone to attracting.

As the global financial tempest batters even the most apparently well-hulled corporations, the world literally heats up and regional and global power struggles and conflicts persist, the Arab people face challenges that verge on the innumerable.

The occupation which still persists in states such as Iraq and the Occupied Palestinian Territories threatens to widen existing rifts and divide societies at a time when their efforts need to be united.

Conflict in these countries saddle Lebanon with a particularly heavy burden; it is estimated that Lebanon is the temporary home of 416,600 Palestinian and 50,000 Iraqi registered refugees.

The Arab people are set to number 385 million by 2015, but resources for that burgeoning population are in seemingly terminal decline. Still, in 2009, all but two of the Arab nations operate below the UN’s official water scarcity level.

Further statistics are alarming. The Arab unemployment rate is twice the world average. More than half of those unemployed are between 16 and 24 years of age, an age group that currently comprises 60 percent of the entire region’s people.

Nearly one in 10 Arabs is officially classed as malnourished.

An estimated 17 million people have been forced from their homes due to conflict in the Arab world over the past half-century, with 10 million internally displaced in Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

There are, however, encouraging signs. Between 1960 and the start of the new millennium, life expectancy in Arab countries increased by 23 years, with mortality rates plummeting from 152 to 39 per thousand. Lebanon, in particular, has made commendable advances in some of areas.

It currently spends more on health as a percentage of public spending than the world average. Nowhere in the Arab world has more doctors per head than Lebanon, and its youth unemployment rate is 10 percent less than the Arab average.

Although conflicts still persist in the region, many Arab countries, Lebanon included, have recently conducted free and fair elections, signaling willingness to coexist after years of destructive civil and regional turmoil.

Much has been achieved, but there is still far more to be done.

For Friday’s Spotlight, Daily Star reporters spoke with leading experts in environmental, social, medical, financial and military fields, asking their advice on what needs to be done in the Arab world to ensure its prosperity and security in years to come.

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