The world"s poorest nations are especially hard hit by the global financial crisis and will feel its impact for years to come, AP quoted U.N. officials as saying today. These countries already were struggling before the economic downturn took hold and now risk seeing the progress they"ve made in recent years slip, the officials said at a conference in the Austrian capital. «The current global financial and economic crisis is hitting the least developed countries severely,» said Cheick Sidi Diarra, High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States. «There is no doubt that the effect of the crisis on (least developed countries) will linger for years.» According to the U.N., 49 countries _ 33 in Africa, 15 in Asia and one in Latin America _ currently qualify as least developed. Especially vulnerable to economic shocks, these countries are now feeling the pinch of the financial crisis through, among other things, the decline of investment, tourism, falling exports and trade imbalances, Diarra said. Kandeh Yumkella, head of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization, said the financial crisis has caused impressive growth rates of African countries to sag significantly this year. While rich, developed countries are using the financial crisis to transform themselves and improve their performance going forward, poor countries now have to struggle even harder to stay afloat. «To catch up is going to be tough _ so you lose momentum, you reverse,» Yumkella said. «Those that were lagging behind don"t have the finances they need just to catch up a little bit _ now it"s even worse.» Yumkella said the most affected countries are the «poorest of the poor,» such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, which on a daily basis have to make choices about spending money on food, medicine or gas. Panitchpakdi Supachai, secretary general of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, warned that some lesser developed countries have debts that equal almost 100 percent of their gross domestic product. «It was 50 percent before the crisis and now ... it"s going to be coming closer and closer to 100 percent,» he said, urging the international community to start considering how to deal with this problem.
