Remarks by Mr. Robert Piper
Rt. Hon’ble Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr. Madhav Kumar Nepal, Hon’ble Deputy Minister of External Affairs of Sri Lanka, Mr. Neomal Perera, Your Excellency Dr. Sheel Kant Sharma, Secretary General, South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation, Dr. Gowher Rizvi, Adviser to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Dr. Sekhar Bonu, Director, Country Coordination & Regional Cooperation Division, South Asia Department, Asian Development Bank, Excellencies, Distinguished representatives of civil society, academia and media, Development partners and UN colleagues, Ladies and gentlemen,
It’s a privilege for me to address this august gathering on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme. I bring you warm greetings from Ajay Chhibber, the UNDP regional director for Asia and the Pacific, who would have very much liked to be here today.
As you are all well aware, this is the third edition of the Annual South Asian Economic Summit and on behalf of UNDP, let me say that we are pleased to see the gradual maturing of the Summit as a credible, broad based platform for generating new thinking and policy options for deeper regional cooperation across South Asia.
I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and applaud the hard work and efforts of the organizing team led by South Asia Watch on Trade, Environment and Economics and the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies jointly with the other partner institutions and think tanks from across the region in organizing this years’ Summit.
On behalf of the UNDP, please allow me as well to join the organizers in extending a warm welcome to all the eminent dignitaries and delegates assembled here today.
I would like to take this opportunity to share some thoughts on the links between the issues of poverty reduction, food security and the phenomena of climate change and to try to identify some potential areas for strengthening regional preparedness and cooperation to address some of the development challenges which are faced by the region.
Let me start by recapping some of the highlights of the recent Asia-Pacific MDG Report 2010/11, produced annually by ESCAP, ADB and UNDP, particularly with regard to the link between poverty and hunger in South Asia.
Overall, the report presents a mixed picture for South Asia’s achievements across all the 21 indicators used to measure MDG progress up to 2008.
While the region has recorded good progress on indicators such as addressing gender gaps, prevalence of HIV and Tuberculosis, it has progressed relatively slowly on meeting poverty related goals.
Despite a decline in the incidence of poverty, in absolute terms, South Asia is still home to nearly half of the world’s poor, estimated somewhere between 450 to 550 million, the vast majority of whom are concentrated in rural areas with agriculture as their mainstay.
The most disturbing shortfalls on MDGs however, relate to prevalence of widespread hunger and malnutrition in the region. The number of hungry people in the region has increased significantly from 286 million to 337 million during the period 1990-92 to 2004-06.
In several countries across South Asia, more than one fifth of the population is estimated to be undernourished. In fact, more than half of the world’s underweight children are in South Asia with underweight prevalence of 41 per cent. This is an alarming situation.
How does this relate to Climate Change? How could climate change lead to a worsening of poverty, hunger and food insecurity in South Asia? Climate change linked risks and vulnerabilities need to be viewed against the backdrop of the already unacceptably high burden of the poor, hungry and the food insecure in the region.
While disentangling the specific impacts of climate change from poverty related impacts may merit more research in specific contexts, there is little doubt that the phenomena of climate change is significantly exacerbating poverty and hunger in many direct and indirect ways in all countries in the region. For example, climate change is believed to lead to an observed increase in the incidence of natural disasters such as droughts and floods with consequent volatility in agricultural production, stocks of fisheries, marine life and availability of water resources and human health.
While no country or region can remain immune from the effects of climate change, the poor everywhere will be more vulnerable given their high dependence on natural resources and agriculture and their limited coping ability to sudden climate linked shocks and losses of assets and livelihoods.
In South Asia, the Himalayan river system may be affected with a potential to reduce water availability not only for hundreds of millions of agriculture dependent rural poor but also urban poor, household and industrial uses downstream.
As nearly three fifths of the cropped area in the region is rain-fed, any variability of rainfall with potential crop failures or decline in yields would also push large sections of the poor into deeper poverty since their only source of income is derived from agriculture and allied activities.
FAO defines food security as encompassing four key dimensions: food availability, food accessibility, food utilization and food system stability. Climate change is now understood to be a critical determinant influencing potentially all four dimensions especially in South Asia.
The World Bank’s World Development Report for 2010, estimated that with a projected warming of 2 degrees Celsius, annual income per capita in South Asia could be reduced by 4-5 percent as compared to a global average GDP loss of about 1 percent and minimal losses in high income countries. These losses would be driven in the main through the agriculture sector.
Given that South Asia needs to catch up and accelerate its progress on MDG 1 on poverty and hunger especially, we must act fast and decisively to work at both ends of poverty reduction and reversing climate change.
Based on a belief that climate change would tend to worsen existing impacts on the poor and the hungry, a key policy response in the region should be to strengthen existing development interventions with a “poor-people-first”- strategy as well as to think innovatively on generating new solutions to these challenges.
Poorer countries in the region have fairly modest institutional and financial capacity and limited technological access to adapt rapidly and commensurately to the mounting challenges.
Climate change is a global phenomenon which requires a global solution. Even as the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change-led Cancun Agreements are being seen as successful in many ways, there are legitimate apprehensions that the world may not be doing enough to reverse the worst effects of climate change.
Cancun made little or no headway in seeking to make adaptation and mitigation technologies more affordable for the needy countries by creating exemptions or limiting the full applicability of intellectual property rights.
While the Cancun outcome on monitoring, reporting and verification is welcome, no country can contemplate a unilateral punitive or trade protectionist policy stance on developing country exports such as through carbon based border adjustment measures on account of failure to cut back on emissions. Trade with appropriate flanking strategies is the main engine of economic growth and poverty reduction and any unilateral protectionist market access barriers would push back the regions’ efforts on MDGs.
Regional cooperation must also carefully craft and build community capacities to use climate change friendly technologies and adopt good practices at the sub national and local levels. Perhaps this Summit may wish to consider recommending comprehensive country by country regional technological needs assessment and action gaps.
Dedicated institutional structures under the aegis of SAARC can be further encouraged, to initiate, build and sustain regional cooperation in all relevant areas as a follow up to the Thimphu Summit and Cancun Agreements especially on technology transfer related issues.
Better synergies between aid for trade and climate change financing also need to be worked out both at the regional and global level.
Given climate change induced food insecurities, SAARC Member States need to fully operationalize the innovative proposal of a regional food bank as an instrument to balance out demand and supply mismatches and orient them favorably to the needs and exigencies of the poorer countries in the region.
I take this opportunity to commend the Secretary General in his efforts to build up the SAARC Secretariat as an institution sensitive to climate change needs of South Asia.
Before I conclude, let me mention a few regional initiatives that we at UNDP are committed to and are working on with other partners. Firstly, the Mountain Alliance Initiative for Climate Change, initiated by the government of Nepal, is bringing the world’s mountainous countries together into one forum to raise global awareness of the special vulnerabilities faced by mountainous countries due to climate change. This initiative has already received global attention and ICIMOD, with support from UNDP has produced a series of technical papers showing the impacts of climate change on mountainous countries. Another regional initiative relates to developing the local capacity in the Himalayan region to identify looming risks of natural hazards, and to prepare for them. Both of these are excellent examples of initiatives that have a regional as well as country specific impact.
I am sure that this Summit will be seen as a milestone event laying down a strong foundation for continuing a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on the theme of climate change, poverty and food security in South Asia.
I wish you all success and commit UNDP’s full support in ensuring that the process gathers further momentum and yields the desired development results which we all wish to see in the region.
Thank you for your presence.