02 September 2010

BEIRUT: Lebanon has exceeded expectation in some development areas but has seriously fallen behind in others, a mere five years before it is expected to reach its Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the United Nations said on Tuesday.

While the country has seen vast improvements in the education and healthcare provisions set as part of the UN development criteria, it has depleted its natural water reserves and endangered its environmental heritage, a deterioration which threatens to undo much of the overall progress.

September has been earmarked as the UN-backed MDG month and will be honored across the world by governments keen to advertize their successes or improve upon their failures, all the while fighting to attract a larger share of dwindling donor funding.

Success in raising education levels, and in particular improving the percentage of women in education, has been mirrored by an improvement in maternal health and child mortality rates which often reflect the mother’s general knowledge.

Continuing this fast pace of improvement in areas where Lebanon already had a comparatively high starting base, however, will be hard, and will require further reform and government assistance, said UN Development Fund (UNDP) project manager, Kawthar Dara, responsible for the MDG framework in Lebanon.

“This year’s global theme for the MDG is uneven progress across goals and countries,” said Dara. “Some drastic improvements have taken place but there have also been some sharp declines, largely because of internal conflict.

“This could be the last official review of the MDGs before 2015 so it is imperative we make sure governments pay attention to the whole MDG agenda.”

In Lebanon, the 2006 summer war with Israel, in which some 1,200 Lebanese, mainly civilians, and 162 Israelis, mostly military personnel, were killed, has been blamed for much of the stagnation in reaching some of the MDG objectives. The 34-day incursion caused widespread biodiversity loss, damaged vital infrastructure and increased poverty in some of the most disadvantages areas, Dara said.

It also further exasperated the age-old problem of inaccurate statistics which continues to plague Lebanon and hinder the formulation of a coherent development strategy.

“In some areas the large influx of cash which flooded into the country post the 2006 war could have helped to alleviate poverty levels but in others the war has certainly had a devastating toll,” said Dara. “Without proper statistics, however, we just don’t know what the on-the-ground consequences of the war were because there are just no accurate figures.

“We also can’t measure how hard the global economic downturn hit Lebanese people because we don’t know what it was like prior to the crisis.”

Although overall poverty is thought to be decreasing slightly, out-of-date statistics, taken prior to 2004, have hindered attempts to combat it affectively.

“The problem is the high concentration of poverty in areas like the Akkar, where between 50 and 60 percent of people are considered ‘poor,’” said Dara. “The government knows that the indicators are not improving here but so far they have done little to address the regional grievances.”

A big push to reduce poverty levels – which Lebanon committed to halving by 2015 compared to 1990 levels – is expected to take place once the ministry of social affairs finalizes its social strategy which will define a poverty reduction strategy and direct assistance to impoverished areas.

This plan will be complimented by the formulation of a national energy “action plan,” currently under consideration by the environment ministry and UNDP, which is intended to prioritize this MDG in the government’s agenda.

Factual inadequacies in these two fields have prevented the UN from publishing a full progress report on the MDGs in Lebanon, but a report is now expected by mid-2011.

“The government’s response to the massive environmental challenges [such as raw sewage and provision of clean drinking water] has been poor,” said Dara. “In the last five years the government has been burdened with other priorities, such as security concerns, but we have allowed unbridled urbanization to take place, we have not controlled deforestation and we have actually reduced the amount of energy we get from renewable sources – this is simply not sustainable,” he added.

“There is only one goal and that goal is survival, we cannot afford luxury anymore – it simply is not an option,” said executive director of the environmental Lebanese NGO Indyact, Wael Hmaidan.

“We all face a very dark environmental future together and while the MDGs are hugely aspirational they are not legally binding and have not been taken seriously by many. We can’t afford to wait any longer.”

Copyright The Daily Star 2010.