SYDNEY: The global downturn has had a serious impact on poor nations and risks reversing improvements made in some countries, the head of the United Nations Development Programme Helen Clark said.

Clark, who was New Zealand’’s prime minister from 1999 to 2008, said the world was already struggling to reduce poverty and hunger and raise living conditions for those in the developing world.

“The economic crisis does not make it easier,” she said in a speech to Sydney’’s Lowy Institute, a foreign policy think-tank.

“It does raise the prospect of going backwards on some of the progress that had been made.”

Clark said prior to the global recession the number of chronically hungry people was estimated at 800 million people but had since risen to about one billion.

In the Pacific alone, thousands had fallen back into poverty since the financial downturn rattled world markets in the later half of 2008.

“Last year we estimated that five Pacific island countries saw an outright contraction in the economy because the recession had eroded the limited income that they had from exports, eroded their tourism and eroded their remittances,” Clark said.

“We estimate that across the Pacific Islands, countless thousands of people and families have fallen back into poverty.”

Clark said as the world dealt with massive humanitarian crises, such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, it needed to “build back better” so the developing world could better withstand future shocks.

“In the past two years alone the world has experienced major food and fuel crises, a global recession and climatic and other natural disasters,” she said.

“Thinking also needs to be given now on the focus of building back better so the world has greater resilience to withstand shocks in the future. Shocks in many forms will keep coming, whether natural disasters or human-induced disasters.”

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