Adonis Diaries

What are human development indicators?  Are they compatible with human basic rights?

Any progress in that endeavor?

Such as Life expectancy in developing countries, infantile mortality rates, infantile-juvenile mortality rates for children below 5 of age, formal schooling duration…

The last decade witnessed a doubling of world GNP to $62 trillion, sort of counting 12 zeros, irrespective of the turmoils and catastrophes that this decade experienced, in invading Iraq, worldwide financial crisis, recurring tsunamis, explosion of nuclear power plants, widespread civil wars in the poorest States…

China quadrupled its GNP and many nations are emerging as potential heavy weight in stabilizing global economic fluctuation.  Unfortunately, two-third of that growth is accounted by real estates and financial stocks markets.

Economic growth set aside, human development indicators are worsening. The world community is witnessing deterioration in selective abortion of girls in China and India, public health degradation, social security instability, increased inequalities among citizens, increased cost of living, shrinking of valuable job opportunities, displacement of temporary work of steady jobs…

While global GNP doubled in this decade, cereal production grew only by 10% and energy consumption remained at the same level, if we discount the coal production in China that accounted to 30% in energy production increase.

Consequently, food prices increased 140% in the last decade and prices of real estates more than doubled.  The standard of living decreased everywhere from last decade level, even if the US and Europe, as the GNP doubled!

What’s going on?

One percent of the Americans earn more than 25% of the total profit and concentrate more than 50% of the wealth of the nation.

You have the same trend in India and many States with absolute monarchies and oligarchies.

Most of that “economic growth” can be localized in owning consumer goods such as cars and other luxury items by Chinese, Indians, and emerging nations’ upper classes and financial growth of multinational enterprises.

Calamities in the least developed countries are being compounded:  Governments of rich nations are no longer contributing effectively to the well-being of the poorest of the poor and civic organizations are relied upon for solidarity with the people not sharing the same opportunities and qualifications.

The determined Arab mass upheavals are demonstrating the yearning of people for basic human rights and dignity, and the uprising are not about to abate.

I believe that seriously tackling the basic criteria of quality of life necessarily lead to improving basic human rights in freedom of expression, liberty of gathering and organizing, and fair equitable election laws that represent all community strata, and laws that prohibit discriminations based on genders, ethnicity, language, and race…

Let us take seriously the UN Charters as super laws governing decency in human relationship.

Note: Statistics were extracted from an article by the economist  Xie Guozhong, published in the French weekly “Corrier International”