Amid financial crisis:
Unrest looms in Asia-Pacific: UN
THAILAND: Asia and the Pacific face a "marked risk" of social unrest
as the global financial crisis bites, but the region continues to lead
international prospects for recovery, a UN survey said Thursday.
The annual survey said that the region faces multiple layers of
crisis ranging from financial breakdown, food and fuel price instability
and climate change that could have wide-ranging effects throughout 2009.
There was "fresh evidence mounting that the worst has yet to come,"
with a big slump in trade, the region's engine of growth, according to
the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2009.
"There is a marked risk that the financial crisis could converge on
itself in a downward spiral of deepening recession, social unrest and
political instability," said the survey.
A key trigger for unrest was that millions of Asian migrants are
returning to their rural homes in search of work after losing jobs in
the crisis-hit export sector, UN Undersecretary General Noeleen Heyzer
said.
"Asia Pacific is under multiple threats and the gains that have been
made in terms of development can be lost very easily," Heyzer told AFP
in an interview ahead of the report's launch in Bangkok.
Investment in job security and social safety nets for the poor must
be sought urgently, she said.
But the UN report said that reforms introduced in recent years,
especially following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, meant the region
could be a future bright spot in the global situation.
Its developing countries "would emerge as primary sources of any
world economic growth that might take place in 2009, thus providing some
global stability," the report said. Bangkok, Thursday, AFP |