Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Mar 14 2006 (IPS) – At a time when people in the developed world are enjoying longer lives, citizens of the world s poorest countries (LDCs) are still expecting to live comparatively short lives.
Against a life expectancy of 82 years in affluent Japan, people in the LDCs can expect to live no more than 50 years.
This is very disturbing in this day and age of good medical opportunities and good programmes aimed to save lives, Anwarul Chowdhury, U.N. under-secretary general for LDCs, told IPS on Tuesday following the opening of a conference here to help the region s LDCs achieve higher development targets.
For the 14 LDCs in the Asia-Pacific region to reach two of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that call for a dramatic reduction in child mortality and maternal mortality rates by 2015 there is a need to connect life expectancy to better reproductive health services, Chowdhury said.
U.N. officials have identified three factors that have conspired to shorten lives of people living in LDCs in the Asia-Pacific region and in other parts of the world. They are inadequate reproductive health services, widespread malnutrition that leads to under-five mortality and the increasing spread of HIV/AIDS.
Laotian Prime Minister Bounnhang Vorachith echoed those concerns during his speech at the conference, saying that child and maternal mortality rates still remains high compared to some other countries in the region (and) HIV/AIDS and other diseases such as malaria continue to impose a serious threat to life.
A set of eight development targets was identified by the international community as the MDGs at a meeting of world leaders in the U.N. in September 2000. By 2015, the U.N. summit pledged, the developing world would strive to halve the number of the world s poor living in extreme poverty and achieve universal primary education.
Goal four dealt with child mortality to reduce by two-thirds in 2015 the under-five mortality rate that prevailed in 1990. Goal five dealt with improving maternal health to reduce by three-quarters in 2015 the maternal mortality ratio that prevailed in 1990.
Currently, 50 countries across the world are classified as LDCs and many, according to Chowdhury, were struggling with abysmal life expectancy figures over a decade back. In some countries it was around 35 years, 10 years ago.
But background papers and speeches at this week s Mar 14-15 conference pointed to efforts made to overcome such disturbing numbers. There are three million fewer child deaths annually, stated Richard Weingarten, executive secretary of the U.N. Capital Development Fund, on the opening morning of the conference. In the past 15 years, life expectancy in developing countries has increased by two years.
According to Aynul Hasan of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a regional U.N. agency based in Bangkok, war-ravaged Afghanistan continues to fare badly with life expectancy at birth being 41 years for males and 43 years for females.
The other Asian LDCs with low life expectancy rates are Burma, Cambodia, East Timor and Laos, where it hovers around 55 for males, while female children are expected to live up to their early 60s.
The other LDCs in the Asia-Pacific region are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kiribati, Maldives, Nepal, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. In Bangladesh, the largest LDC, with a population of 143 million, the average lifespan for females is 63 years and for males, 62 years.
Chowdhury s concern that low life expectancy is linked to poor health services is reflected in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2005 . It notes that in countries like Burma public expenses for health account for only 0.4 percent of the country s gross domestic product (GDP), while in Laos public health expenses for health is 1.5 percent of GDP and in Nepal it is 1.4 percent of GDP.
According to UNDP, the reality of low life expectancy rates, along with difficulty on five other MDGs, will make it increasingly hard for the 14 LDCs in the Asia-Pacific region to reach the 2015 development targets.
Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Kiribati and Tuvalu have a slow pace of achievement, stated another UNDP study, Voices of the Least Developed Countries of Asia and the Pacific.
Current trends indicate that around two million children, under five years of age, will die in 2015 in Asia-Pacific LDCs, it added. In Cambodia, the infant mortality rate actually increased from 80 to 96 per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2002. If current trends persist, 311,000 children will die within the first year of their life in 2015.