Date: Fri, 18 Sep 98 09:34:26 PDT From: Max Blanchet Subject: Human Development 1998 HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT -- UNDP The UN Development Program (UNDP) last week released its annual Human Development Report, in which the UNDP found--not surprisingly--"gross inequalities in consumption" between rich and poor nations. Globally, the richest 20% of the world's population (in the highest-income countries) account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures-- the poorest 20% a mere 1.3%. According to UNDP Administrator James Gustave Speth, "We must make a determined effort to eradicate poverty and expand the consumption of more than one billion desperately poor people who have been left out of the global growth in consumption." It is what the report does not say about the need for less consumption by people in the world's richest countries which has angered some observers. Critics said last week that UNDP failed to acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between high consumption in rich countries and low consumption in developing nations. According to Sio Zadek, Development Director at the New Economics Foundation, UNDP has adhered to the "trickle-down" theory of economic development, which assumes that wealth from the few will trickle down to the poor via jobs in services. "If you argue that the only route to poverty alleviation is economic growth based on globalised trade, it follows that you will not say that rich people should earn less or consume less. You will say that rich people should consume less nasty things. The logic stops and starts with whether continued economic growth and [consumption by the rich] is the way for others to become less poor, " Mr. Zadek said. Among other data revealed in the report, UNDP cited two crises pushing the earth to the "outer limits" of what it can withstand. First are the pollution and waste that exceed the planet's sink capacities to absorb and convert them. Second is the growing deterioration of renewable resources--water, soil, forests, fish, biodiversity. "The world's dominant consumers are overwhelmingly concentrated among the well-off, but the environmental damage from the world's consumption falls most severely on the poor," according to the UNDP report. "Human Development Report 1998," UN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM, September 9, 1998; "Consumption gap is widening, says UN report," IPS, September 9, 1998; "Au Nord, la consommation explos. Pendant ce temps, le Sud trinque," INFOSUD/TRIBUNE DE GENEVE, September 11, 1998.