Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - A new report from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) that came out on Thursday said that the global...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - A new report from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) that came out on Thursday said that the global cost-of-living crisis is pushing another 71 million people in the world's poorest countries into extreme poverty.
Achim Steiner, who is in charge of the UNDP, said that an analysis of 159 developing countries showed that this year's rise in prices for key commodities has already hurt parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, Asia, and other places.
The UNDP asked for actions to be tailored. It wanted to give cash directly to the most vulnerable people and for richer countries to make the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), which they set up to help poor countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, bigger and better.
Steiner said, "This cost-of-living crisis is pushing millions of people into poverty and even starvation with incredible speed." "Because of this, the chance of more social unrest grows every day."
Institutions like the UN, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund have a number of "poverty lines," including one for the poorest countries where people live on $1.90 or less a day. A line at $3.20 a day for countries with lower middle-incomes and a line at $5.50 a day for countries with higher middle-incomes.
"We estimate that the current cost-of-living crisis may have pushed over 51 million more people into extreme poverty at $1.90 a day and another 20 million at $3.20 a day," the report said. This would bring the total number of people living in extreme poverty around the world to just over 1.7 billion.
It also said that targeted cash transfers from the government would be more "fair and cost-effective" than subsidies on things like energy and food prices, which tend to help the rich more.
The UNDP's Head of Strategic Policy Engagement, George Gray Molina, said, "In the long run, they make inequality worse, make the climate crisis even worse, and don't help in the short term."
The last two years of the pandemic have also shown that these poor countries would need help from the rest of the world to pay for these plans.
Molina said they could do this by extending the G20-led Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) by two more years and making it available to at least 85 countries instead of the 73 that are eligible right now.
