El Nino caused $20 billion in damage to Asia-Pacific
El Nino caused $20 billion in damage to Asia-Pacific
MANILA (Agencies): The current El Nino is estimated to have caused in excess of US$20 billion worth of damage to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and the Pacific Islands, according to a report released yesterday by the Asian Development Bank.
The Asian Development Outlook said this amount was significantly larger than the damage caused by the 1982-83 El Nino.
"For countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, which were the hardest hit by El Nino, the economic impact is projected to cause a fall in output of 1 percent in 1998," the report said.
The name El Nino -- Spanish for "the child" -- was bestowed by Peruvian fishermen because it usually arrived around Christmas time.
It is a natural climatic phenomenon, caused by a warming of the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, that occurs every two to seven years and lasts up to 18 months.
The 1982-83 El Nino was called the El Nino of the Century and was blamed for $8 billion in damage and 1,500 deaths worldwide in severe flooding, destructive waves, drought and storms.
The droughts caused by El Nino resulted in forest fires that swept across Indonesia between August and October 1997, destroying millions of hectares of forest and enveloping Southeast Asia in a poisonous haze.
Asia's battered economies will start to recover next year but it will take several more before they return to the surging growth rates that once so entranced the world, the bank said.
And if governments do not sort out their problems now, particularly with economic reforms, inevitable social turbulence could turn into political unrest, it warned in its annual development outlook.
The ADB also said yesterday that Asia's developing countries must invest heavily in their rapidly growing labor force if they are to regain the growth momentum stunted by the region's financial crisis.
"In the absence of adequate investment in human resources, Asia's developing economies would be seriously hindered in their efforts to sustain economic growth in an increasingly competitive and integrated world," the Asian Development 1998 report said.
Cheaper labor from Bangladesh, China, India and Vietnam is threatening to edge out the so-called Asian miracle economies from low-end export markets, it said.