The fifth Arab Human Development Report has met with the usual controversy. Gihan Shahine sifts through its pages Um Mohamed exemplifies what the fifth Arab Human Development report (AHDR) 2009, released on 21 July in Beirut, is all about. She has no social or medical security, no access to potable water. Her eldest son is jobless, and she has been abandoned by her husband. She has to pay her rent and feed ten children on whatever she can earn as a maid. Um Mohamed is not alone. The AHDR, the outcome of more than two years of research by 100 independent Arab researchers sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), concludes that the Arab world lacks "the kind of material and moral foundation that secures lives, livelihoods and an acceptable quality of life for the majority". Titled Challenges to Human Security in Arab Countries, the report argues that "human security is a prerequisite for development, and that the widespread absence of human security in Arab countries undermines people's options". "The tendency is to think of security only in military or state security terms," says Amat Al-Alim Alsoswa, the director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States. "But the security of people themselves is threatened not just by conflict and civil unrest but also by environmental degradation, discrimination, unemployment, poverty and hunger." The 208-page report attempts to put a new spin on why the Arab region lags behind so much of the world in terms of water supply, representative government, discrimination against women and minority groups, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, poverty, wars and conflicts -- all key threats to human security. It cites some alarming figures. On average 18.3 per cent of the people living in nine Arab countries were defined as extremely poor in the period between 1999 and 2006. In Egypt the number of people suffering extreme poverty rose from 10.6 million in 1999 to an estimated 13.7 million people in 2006. A tenth of the population of Arab countries is malnourished. The number of food-deprived persons living in the Arab region rose from 20 million in 1991 to around 23.3 million in 2002. The proportion of underweight children under five years of age remained relatively high in 2000, standing at 12.7 per cent, while "health-care -- and women's health in particular -- are not prioritised in national budgets," the report said. Between 2005 and 2006 unemployment among the young in Arab countries stood at 30 per cent, more than double that of the rest of the world. The rate of unemployed young Arab women (13.2 per cent) is also among the highest in the world. The future may be even bleaker. Soon about 60 per cent of the population is expected to be under 25 years old "making this one of the most youthful regions in the world," says the report. A major challenge in the coming years will be creating the 51 million new jobs by 2020 needed to absorb new entries to the labour market "who will otherwise face an empty future". According to UN estimates, Arab countries will be home to around 395 million people by 2015 compared to 317 million in 2007 and 150 million in 1980. The authors of the report expect overpopulation to pose "security threats" which will be exacerbated by the fact that nine out of 13 Arab countries studied are already experiencing "significant to critical water stress". Egypt headed Arab countries suffering critical scarcity of renewable internal freshwater resources in 2005. Meanwhile, the contribution of agriculture to the region's economic performance is declining. Only 35 per cent of the region's land can be used for agriculture, the lowest ratio in the world. A lack of "adequate water supply and arable land has contributed to the Arab region's dependence on aggregate food imports," the report said. It warns that Arab economies remain particularly vulnerable to economic downswings. "Real GDP per capita grew by a mere 6.4 per cent," it said, a conclusion based on World Bank data between 1980 and 2004. "The fabled oil wealth of the Arab countries presents a misleading picture of their economic situation, one that masks the structural weaknesses of many Arab economies and the resulting insecurity of countries and citizens alike." The authors underlined the need for Arab nations to "move from a dependence on oil, which accounts for more than 70 per cent of the region's exports, to a more diversified, knowledge- based economy that provides employment opportunities". Wars and conflicts have been a major source of insecurity. Mortality rates soared after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. "Based on the Iraq Family Health Survey, the mortality rate in general nearly doubled from 3.17 per 1,000 inhabitants before the invasion to 6.01 per 1,000 afterwards, and the number of violent deaths increased tenfold," the report said. Children and adolescents suffered most. "Nearly a third of those who died in the December 2008-January 2009 Israeli operation in Gaza were children, and approximately 1,709 children were wounded." The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that approximately half of Palestinian households are dependent on food aid provided by the international community. "Some 33 per cent (or 700,000 people) of what was formerly a middle-income society in the West Bank now relies on food aid," the report said. "Worse still, the figure for Gaza stands at 80 per cent of households, or 1.3 million people." "A single full-day closure inflicts $7 million income-related losses in the West Bank and Gaza." It is no wonder that over half of respondents in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon described their present living conditions as "not safe at all" in a Human Security Survey conducted for the AHDR in four countries, the other two being Kuwait and Morocco. Neither do people living in countries which are not afflicted by wars feel safe. "All Arab justice systems suffer in one form or another from blows to their independence that stem from executive domination of both the legislative and judicial branches," concludes the report. Six countries continue to prohibit the formation of political parties while extended emergency laws have resulted in the incarceration of thousands of political prisoners in the Arab region. Out of five Arab countries surveyed, Iraq had the highest number of political prisoners in the period between 2005 and 2007: 26,000 prisoners now reduced to 14,000. Egypt scored the second with 10,000 political prisoners in detention. The report calls for stronger laws to protect the environment, a change to legislation that discriminates against women, increased efforts to end hunger, and greater access to affordable, quality healthcare. It also called for major efforts to strengthen the rule of law. It does not, however, offer any concrete strategy as to how these goals can be achieved. Samir Radwan, ex-assistant to the director-general of the ILO, believes that the report -- albeit accurate and valuable -- is "eclectic and losing focus". He told Al-Ahram Weekly that he finds it ironic that in a report discussing human insecurity, conflicts in Palestine and Iraq should be relegated to the fifth chapter when issues such as female genital mutilation (FGM), discrimination against women and minorities and climate change dominate earlier chapters. "It smacks of flavour of the month," says Radwan. "All UN reports must include women's issues, minorities and climate change." It is not that Radwan believes such issues to be unimportant, "they are just off-point and offer a distraction from more urgent concerns". "The report has not actually come up with anything new, it is pouring old wine in new bottles. There are already many studies on unemployment and poverty. It is high time we broke the cycle and jump from diagnosis to discussing solutions, analysing what we might learn from success stories in countries like China and Malaysia." The eclecticism and lack of focus about which Radwan complains were not, says AHDR lead author Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, an accident. He told a press conference on the eve of the report's launch that UN officials had succumbed to external pressures by "less democratic regimes in the region" to remove sections of the report related to the behaviour of oppressive regimes and of the impact of occupation on human security. The focus of the report, El-Sayed charges, was thus redirected to issues related to poverty and unemployment. El-Sayed told al-jazeera.net that the final draft he had submitted was very different to the report that was eventually published. "The issue of the American-Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Golan Heights, Iraq and Somalia, and its effect on the security of Arab people, were all downplayed at the insistence of the United States and Israel and at the expense of Arab issues," said El-Sayed. He added that some UN consultants had been inclined to reject the idea of human security from the beginning and even suggested mentioning the positive aspects of the US occupation of Iraq.
