GLOBAL
REPORT The
Facts |
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Starting
points
Some
of the basic facts and figures behind the
countries and subjects
featured this month.
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Leader President Roberto Suazo Cordoba
Government The Liberal arty won the November 1981 elections after
18 years of military rule.
Population 3.6 million
Life
expectancy 58 years
Income per head Average $530, though half received by 0% f the
people
Economy Bananas, coffee, sugar and lumber make up 80% of exports.
But while ten years ago 57 pounds
of bananas
would
buy a barrel
of oil today 440 pounds are needed
The
US fruit companies have traditionally forced land holding
into a unequal pattern – with the support of Honduran
politicians and the military. The US now looks towards Honduras
as an island of stability in Central America and gives strong
support to its Army. Aid of that kind is unlikely to help
the 50 per cent child malnutrition rate. More positive results
can be expected from pressure exerted by the campesino unions. |
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Leader:
President J.R. Jayawardene
Government:
United National Party, which easily defeated
the opposition Socialist Coalition in the 1977 elections
Population:
14.5 million
Life
expectancy 66 years
Income per head $230
Economy Largely self-sufficient in food, but 60% of export earnings
from coffee, cotton and sisal
are spent on oil imports.
Sri
Lanka is economically among the poorest twenty nations
in the world. Yet life expectancy is
the same as in Portugal,
infant mortality id the same as in &Yugoslavia, and literary
as high as anywhere in Asia. The reason is the country’s
sustained investment in basic social services – free
health, free education and subsidised food. The bonus is
population slowdown. Overall, absolute poverty is likely
to be abolished by the year 2000. |
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Leader President
Julius Nyerere
Government One-party state, with decentralised government
committed to ‘socialism and self-reliance’
Population 18 million
Life
expectancy 52 years
Income per head Average $260
Economy Largely self-sufficient in food, but 60% of export earnings
from coffee, cotton and sisal
are spent on oil imports.
Tanzania
has been the proving ground for President Nyerere’s
concept of ‘African socialism’ – based
on self-governing co-operatives, or ujamaa villages. Nearly
90 per cent of the population still live and work on the
land and cash crops are the only source of export earnings.
But with three-quarters of peasants still earning less
than the government minimum wage the pull of the towns
is enormous.
And a slump in world market prices means both hardship
on the land and unemployment in the city. |
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Leader President
Ali Naser Mohammed
Government One-party state with Yemeni Socialist Party pursuing
marxist-style policies
Population 1.9 million
Life
expectancy 45 year
Income per head Average $480 with government wages restricted
to one-to-three scale
Economy Cotton and fish are the only real exports earners. Oil
prospecting has been in vain and
former British Petroleum
refinery at Aden barely breaks even. 60 per cent
of foreign exchange comes from the remittances
of Yemenis
working
abroad
With
a per capita income barely one-fortieth of its giant
neighbour, independent Yemen has
sought
radical
ways
of improving self-reliance. Land has been nationalised
and
agriculture
co-operatives launched. But starting with only
eight doctors for the whole country foreign
assistance was vital to promote
health. And now Yemen is pioneering a primary
health care programme4 designed to give substance
to the
WHO slogan ‘Health
for all by the year 2000’. |
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Leader Prime
Minister Kare Willloch
Government Western-style democracy; the Conservative Right
party won the September 1981 election after 32 years
of nearly uninterrupted Labour party rule.
Population 4 million
Life
expectancy 75 years
Income per head $10,700
Economy The recent exploitation of large North Sea oilfields
together with repeated price increases
has made petroleum
the country’s major export. Other incomes
come from shipbuilding, metals, timber and fish.
Norway
has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the West – between
two and three per cent – and a highly developed social
welfare system. It can boast one of the world’s fairest
patterns of wealth distribution, a generous aid programme
and a sympathetic stance on many Third World issues. But
back home commitment to growth has brought angry protest
from environmentalists, NGO’s and the indigenous
Lapps whose homelands are being threatened. |
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• The
1981 harvest was big enough to feed 1½ times the world’s
population
• Yet
100 million children went to bed hungry each night
In
global terms there is no food problem – production has
been expanding faster than population growth. But each year there
are more malnourished people because of what the World Bank calls
a ‘shortage of effective demand’ for food – people
can’t afford to buy it. So one third of world cereal production
goes to feed cattle, while 450 million people go hungry. The
hungriest continent, Africa, is a net exporter of protein to
Europe. |
• After
thousands of years of steady acceleration, the rate
of world population growth has begun to slow down.
• It
is now predicted to reach 6 billion by the year 2000.
Contraceptives
increases peoples’ control over their
lives. But they only lower birth rates if people want less
children. Experience suggests that people want smaller families
only when they are sure that their children will survive,
when incomes increase so that child labour is no longer essential,
and when security improves so that children are not the only
means of support in illness and old age. |
• The
global workforce is growing by 75 million a year
• Two
out of three workers in the poor world are self-employed.
Three out of four work on the land
With
no social security in the Third World, people have to work.
The problem is that
the poor simply don’t make
enough from the work they do. Africa’s workforce is
predicted to double by the year 2000. Only ten per cent will
get jobs
in industry. The answer there, as elsewhere, is to give people
control of sufficient productive resources – land,
technology, capital – to make a living for themselves. |
• Four
out of five children in the Third World never see a health
worker
• Out
of 125 million children born in 1981, twelve million will
die before their first birthday.
The
causes of infant mortality are well known, as are the steps
necessary to eradicate them.
Primary health care aims
to do
it by training part-time village health workers. The problem
is not in the theory but in the practice: it only works
when doctors and hospitals are also made available to the
majority
through an effective referral system. Otherwise it can
just be a way of fobbing off the poor with second-class medicine. |
• Two
out of every three illiterate people are women
•
Women do two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receive
one-tenth of the income and own one hundredth of the property
In
the industrialised worlds there has been an explosion of women
into the labour force – with more than six of every
ten American women working out of the home. But the Third
World’s
growing cash economies tend to exclude women. And the mechanisation
of agriculture actually increases their workload. As with
family planning, too often it is the men who take the decisions
and
the women who take the consequences. |
• More
than three-quarters of all wealth created in 1981 went to the
already rich quarter of the world’s population
• Average
rich world incomes increased by almost $1,400 whilst the
poorest quarter got an extra $30.
During
1981 the Third World’s
repayments of past loans totalled about the same as all new
aid and loans. The price
the Third World gets for its raw materials again fell in
relation to the price it pays for manufacturing goods. So
industrialised
nations benefit from the ‘terms of trade’ as
well as the employment and ‘value added’ from
processing raw materials on which the poor world depends
for its living. |
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