Guyana moves one spot up in UN human development report - Olver says consensus needed on future direction
The 1999 UN Human Development Report was launched yesterday at the Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel with a focus on globalisation with a human face. The tenth of its kind, the report makes "a powerful plea for a rewriting of the rules of globalization, to make it work for people and not just for profits." According to the report which ranks the levels of human development in 174 countries worldwide using four indicators, Guyana has moved one spot up from its position last year. The indicators used are the Human Development Index (HDI), the Gender Related Development Index (GRDI), the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and the Human Poverty Index (HPI). Countries are divided into high, medium and low human development and Guyana ranks 99 this year on the HDI with a value of 0.701 (the highest being 1 on a scale of 1 to 0) and thus falls into the medium category. According to the other indicators Guyana ranked 83 on the GRDI and took the 57th spot on the GEM. The top five countries on the HDI are Canada (value at 0.932), Norway and the United States (0.927), Japan (0.924), and Belgium (0.923) while the lowest ranked countries are Sierra Leone (0.254), Niger and Ethiopia (0.298), Burkina Faso (0.304) and Burundi (0.324). The top five countries in the medium category are Trinidad and Tobago with a rank of 46 (0.797 value), Hungary (0.795), Venezuela (0.792), Panama (0.791) and Mexico (0.786) while the lowest countries in this category are the Comoros with a rank of 139 (value at 0.506), Pakistan (0.508), Cambodia (0.508), Kenya (0.519) and the Congo (0.533). However, on the Human Poverty Index of the developed countries (HPI 2), the highest ranking country on the HDI, Canada, ranks only 9th while Norway is ranked 4th, the United States 17th, Japan 8th and Belgium 11th. This shows fairly large pockets of poverty in these countries. At the launching ceremony, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative, Richard Olver, in his introduction, explained that the report was for and about people. He said it measures the effects of changes on people who are what development is all about. He said that both growth and equity were required to build Guyana. Emphasising the management of globalisation in the promotion of equity, he focused on women who, he said, were often marginalised. One of the main reasons for this, he said, was that they were the care givers. These issues, he said, must be addressed by both civil society, the private sector and the government to build and promote equity which is necessary for human development and to build the incomes of the poor. He said that though Guyana has embarked on the process of globalisation, it is far behind and consensus is needed on the future direction as the spread of globalisation is "hard to resist" and should not be "uncritically embraced". He posited that though globalisation could have the negative effect of increased inequality, the good news was that it facilitated the spread of common values and ethics and the development of a global consensus on human rights. The public sector, he said, needs to transform itself as a means of social protection. He said the UNDP has a role to play in supporting this transformation. He pointed out that the Report was divided into the National and International Human Development Reports and said that the National Report had a significant role to play as it focused on the likely social impacts of foreign investment and contained several recommendations. Dr Martin Boodhoo, UNDP's Management consultant, in giving a brief overview of the Report, told the gathering that the Report consisted of five chapters. The fourth chapter focuses on National Responses to make globalisation work for human development. He said that while globalisation had enabled greater opportunities for people and made the world more prosperous, the share of low human development fell from 20% to 10% between 1975 to 1997, "these trends mask great unevenness in the advances...". He said that the Report showed that more than a quarter of the 4.5 billion people in developing countries still do not have some of life's most basic choices - survival beyond age forty, access to education, and clean water. About 840 million are undernourished and an estimated 3.3 billion people live on incomes of less than US$1 per day. He said that according to the report, gender disparities also loom large as in developing countries there are still 60% more illiterate women than men with the starkest disparity being in the political and economic arena as only in five countries they occupy more than 30% of parliamentary seats and in 31 they occupy less than 5%. He indicated that the report focuses on three major courses of action. One is stronger policies for social protection for human development, while the second is enhanced international cooperation as many problems of human development go beyond what individual nations can tackle on their own, and for the third, there should be collaborative efforts from communities, Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs), corporations and nation states to protect and promote human development. Dr Maurice Odle of the CARICOM secretariat, in his comments concurred that while globalisation allowed for increasing GDP across the world, it was increasing inequalities. In reviewing the recommendations in the report, he observed that there should also be a regional focus as many developing countries are part of groupings such as CARICOM and it is difficult for them to survive on their own and as such they have regional policies and approaches which the report does not take into account. The ceremony ended after brief remarks by Minister of Foreign Affairs, Clement Rohee and Prime Minister, Sam Hinds who was presented with a copy of the report. (Alana Brassington) 
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