U.N.: Poverty falling in Asia

GENEVA - Extreme poverty has been declining in Asia over the past 25 years but has grown steadily in Africa's poorest countries, where nearly 65 percent of the people now live on less than a dollar a day, a U.N. report said Tuesday.\nAsian countries have been able to improve the lot of many of their citizens by economic growth, but the poorest African countries find themselves "caught in an international poverty trap," said the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.\nThe agency's 285-page Least Developed Countries Report is the most comprehensive study yet of poverty in the world's 49 poorest countries, said UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero.\n"We have seen the number of people living on less than one dollar a day in those countries doubling over the last 30 years to reach 307 million people," he said.\nThe agency examined poverty in the poorest countries, adjusting prices to the buying power of a U.S. dollar in 1985.\nIn the African countries studied, 55.8 percent of the population lived below the line in the 1960s. The percentage grew until it was 64.9 percent in the period 1995-9, the annual study said.\nIn Asia, however, the percentage dropped from 35.5 percent in the 1965-9 period to 23 percent by the end of the 1990s.\nCongo fares the worst, with 90.5 percent below the line. In Asia, Myanmar, also known as Burma, was much the worst, at 52.3 percent.\nPoverty is so widespread in some countries that there is little margin for investment to stimulate the growth that could benefit many of the poorest, Ricupero said.\nThe study found that even people earning minuscule amounts are often able to save something, but it is so little that the savings can easily be wiped out by disasters or setbacks.\nFurthermore, Ricupero said, many of the countries classed by the United Nations as "least developed" rely heavily on the export of commodities whose values been in a long decline.\n"Globalization," which lowers national barriers to trade and investment and makes corporate takeovers easier, "is tightening the international poverty trap" partly because of the way it is has dramatically reduced the number of firms in world commodity markets, the report said.\nHarvard economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, a U.N. adviser on development, said in New York that the report underscores the need for an international partnership of trade and aid.\n"Too many of the impoverished countries are stuck in a trap of poverty that they will not get out with their own resources," said Sachs, who will shortly become the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.\nSachs praised the report.\n"The weight of what is in here is wonderful when it says we need a comprehensive strategy that is aid and trade, not this rhetoric that it's trade not aid."\nPrevious international attempts to force belt-tightening on poor countries failed "and it left hundreds of millions of people extremely vulnerable," he said.\nSachs was also critical of the policy direction of the richest countries, the United States in particular, which he said had targeted its aid since Cold War days to allies.\n"In general the least developed countries get a very small share of aid, which is amazing because they are the ones who really need it," Sachs said.\nThe goal should be "targeted assistance" in education, against AIDS, and promoting clean water, he said.