Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Gyan Chandra Acharya, the UN High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States in a press conference in Hotel Titanic, Antalya – Turkey, (27/05). Photo TP/Raimundos Oki
By Raimundos Oki
Report from Antalya, Turk
ANTALYA – United Nations categorizes there
are 48 States in the world that lack of development.
Starting
on Friday, the 48 least developed countries (LDCs) of the world was focus of a
global United Nations conference in Antalya, Turkey, that aims to review their
progress over the past five years.
In 2011,
the international community adopted the Istanbul
Programme of Action (IPoA)
which charts a vision and strategy for the sustainable development of LDCs for
the next decade; half way into it, this Midterm Review will take stock of successes,
challenges, and lessons learned.
Participation
is coming from the highest political level, with representatives from
governments, the private sector, multilateral organizations, civil society, and
academia. It will result in an inter-governmentally negotiated and agreed
outcome in the form of a political declaration.
According
to the UN Office that supports the world’s most vulnerable nations (OHRLLS), the LDCs represent the poorest and
weakest segment of the international community, comprising more than 880
million people (12 per cent of the global population) and often suffer from
governance crisis, political instability and, in some cases, internal and external
conflicts.
The
category of LDCs was officially established in 1971 by the UN General Assembly
to attract special international support for the most vulnerable and
disadvantaged members of the UN family. The current list of LDCs includes 34 in
Africa, 13 in Asia and the Pacific and 1 in Latin America. The newest to have
joined is South Sudan.
A United
Nations conference focused on the world's least developed countries (LDCs)
kicked-off today in Antalya, Turkey, to assess these 48 States' progress over
the past five years, and to find ways of accelerating their path towards
sustainable development.
“Least
developed countries have seen significant progress and are a major human and
natural resource potential for the world, but more needs to be done to support
them,” said Gyan Chandra Acharya, the UN High Representative for Least
Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island
Developing States, speaking in the Turkish coastal city.
“This
event is a major opportunity for the international community to come together
and reaffirm global commitments that were made in 2011 to ensure that the
world's poorest nations are at the forefront of efforts to build an inclusive
and sustainable future for the world,” he added.
Five years
ago, UN Member States met in Turkey and adopted the Istanbul
Programme of Action (IPoA), a
ten-year plan to give impetus to economic and social development in some of the
world's most vulnerable States.
The
opening session of the Midterm
Review of the IPoA, co-organized by Mr. Acharya's Office (OHRLLS) and the Government of Turkey, brought
together high-level representatives and over two thousand stakeholders from
governments, international and regional organizations, civil society, the
private sector, foundations, think tanks and the media.
The
three-day event will focus on how LDCs have experienced some progress in areas
including poverty reduction, child mortality, gender parity and access to
internet and mobile networks. Economic growth has also been strong even though
its pace has been more volatile and below the average of the last decade. There
has also been an increase in the number of countries fulfilling criteria, which
will lead towards graduation from their status as an LDC.
Countries
that demonstrate the lowest indicators of socioeconomic development – typically
high infant mortality rates and low life expectancy rates, among others – are
considered LDCs. A country is classified as an LDC if it meets three criteria:
- Poverty
– adjustable criterion based on Gross National Income (GNI) per capita averaged
over three years. As of 2015 a country must have GNI per capita less than US
$1,035 to be included on the list, and over $1,242 to graduate from it.
-
Human resource weakness (based on
indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy); and
-
Economic vulnerability (based on
instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and
services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export
concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population
displaced by natural disasters)
According
to the UN, Samoa is the only country to have graduated since 2011. Equatorial
Guinea, Vanuatu and Angola are scheduled to graduate, and seven other LDCs –
Bhutan, Kiribati, Nepal, Sao Tome and Principe, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste
and Tuvalu – have reportedly met the criteria as of March 2015. Only Botswana,
Cape Verde and Maldives graduated before 2011.
“This is
an important opportunity to focus on the special needs of LDCs, and to assess
the status of implementation of the IPoA, taking into account last year's
important global agendas, including the 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development and
the associated Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs),” said Helen Clark,
the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), at the opening plenary.
“Despite
important progress, however, significant challenges remain: 51 per cent of the
population of LDCs live in extreme poverty, and 18 million children of school
age are not in school. Despite LDCs having 12.5 per cent of the world's
population, their exports account for only 1.1 per cent of the global total,”
she noted.
The
category of least developed countries (LDCs) was officially established in 1971
by the UN General Assembly to attract special international support to
disadvantaged members of the UN family. The current list includes 34 in Africa, 13 in Asia and
the Pacific, and one in Latin America. The newest to have joined is South
Sudan.
“We cannot
accept that in the next 15 years there will not be a reduction in the number of
LDCs,” said Mogens Lykketoft, the President of the 70th session of the General
Assembly, in an interview with the UN News Service.
“We have to make sure that there is enough
growth in their economies so that there will be many, many, of the LDCs moving
out of that category. It has been all too few up until now,” he lamented,
noting that many are still least developed because of conflict, which if left
uncontained, will impede efforts to end underdevelopment, poverty and hunger.
Speaking
at a press conference, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mevlüt
Çavuşoğlu, said the global community should never forget that humanitarian
and social development is “indispensable” for sustainable development.
“We will
continue to bring the challenges of least developed countries to the agenda of
G-20,” he stressed, noting that Turkey's official development aid was about $1
billion in 2010, and increased to $3.9 billion in 2015. (Oki)
This article also published in the Timor Post daily newspaper, Thursday 1st of June 2016, page 21.
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