REUTERS, Mexico City | Wednesday
A THIRD of the world’s six billion people live in a state of extreme poverty, a state of “brutal inequality” that mars the dawn of the new millennium, says the United Nations.
In a preview to a report on world population, the UN Population Fund representative in Mexico said one signal of the gulf separating rich and poor is that while per capita income in 17 nations surpasses $20000 a year, inhabitants in 21 other nations subsist with less than $1 000 a year.
At the far extreme of this scale lie Tanzania and Sierra Leone, with per capita income of less than $500. On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, are the super-rich nations of the United States, Switzerland, Norway and Singapore.
Alfonso Sandoval, the UN Population Fund representative in Mexico, said that as of mid-2000, the earth’s population was 6.055 billion people and growing at an annual rate of 1.3%. This translates into an addition of 76 million people, the number of inhabitants in Vietnam or the Philippines.
“It also means the net increase of 145 people per minute or 2.4 every second,” said Sandoval.
80% of the globe’s inhabitants reside in so-called developing nations, while 20% live in developed nations like the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and Australia, according to the report.
It also noted that during the five years stretching from 2000 to 2005, Europe will begin to see negative growth levels and the developed nations as a whole will reach this phenomenon within 20 years.
The UN report mirrors a World Bank annual report on development, released last week, that showed that poverty-reduction efforts have been very uneven from country to country.
One of the more striking effects of the globe’s inequality can be found in the area of health care. Because of limited access to birth control in scores of countries, AIDS has caused more than 20 million deaths in just two decades, with 35 million more currently afflicted by the disease, the UN report said.
The death toll from AIDS exceeds the number of deaths in World War II, the UN added.