IN a report bound to spur debate, the United Nations Development Programme yesterday issued its annual Human Development Index, ranking Jamaica well behind countries such as Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

The report, whose theme revolves around the need to strengthen the world’s faltering democracies, ranked 173 countries based on a variety of achievements, including life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income.

Norway topped the index, followed by Sweden, Canada, Belgium, Australia and the United States. Africa’s Sierra Leone was at the bottom.

In the Caribbean, the index ranked St Kitts and Nevis No 44; Trinidad and Tobago No 50; Antigua and Barbuda No 52; Cuba No 55; and St Lucia No 66.

Jamaica ranked No 86 on both the development index and a Gender Empowerment Measure, measuring participation of women in political decision-making, according to written statements summarising the report.

Jamaica ranked 15 points behind rigidly Islamic Saudi Arabia; 18 points behind war-torn Colombia; and 31 points behind communist Cuba.

“I don’t see how Jamaica could be so far behind those countries,” Benjamin Clare, minister of state in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, told the Observer, following a news conference about the report at the United Nations Development Programme’s Kingston office.

Clare said he would look at the “methodology” employed by UN experts, but noted the conclusions were puzzling.

“In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive a car, and their prospect of education is very limited. And some of their laws are very harsh and ancient — such as beheadings,” said Clare.

Although Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth may give it higher per capita income than Jamaica, Clare said, “only a small portion of the population enjoys a high standard of living. The rest are living in very archaic conditions. I dare say that we have good education facilities, and good health as well.

“Saudi Arabia can’t be ranked as a democracy.”

According to the US State Department, Saudi Arabia does not permit public criticism of Islam or the royal family, and the government prohibits the public practice of religion other than Islam. Criminals can be lashed, beheaded or have limbs amputated.

Homosexual activity is among the crimes that can merit a death sentence, says the State Department. Religious police in some areas pressure women to cover themselves from head to toe with a black covering called an Abaya.

Colombia, often disparaged as a “narco-democracy” for its drug trade, is in the midst of a bloody civil war involving it armed forces, Marxist narco-guerrillas, and para-military death squads. It has the world’s highest murder and kidnapping rates.

And communist Cuba is widely criticised for its lack of a free press, free elections, and its political prisoners; however, its health-care and education systems have won praise.

When asked how Jamaica could trail such nations, Gillian Lindsay-Nanton, a UN resident representative, said UN offices may not have collected data that gave the whole picture of the nations listed.

“The data that the HDR office collects is from UN agencies. It may well be that there has been a failing, and I suspect that in a lot of instances, failures of countries to report to UN agencies, so that that data could be captured.”

Regarding Jamaica’s 15-point ranking behind Saudi Arabia on Gender Empowerment, Lindsay-Nanton indicated that a written statement had not accurately summarised the report. Reporters were not given the report.

The UN agency’s rankings were derived from a worldwide network of “leaders” in academia, government and civil society, according to a written statement.

The experts utilised a methodology that looks “beyond per capita income, human resource development, and basic needs as a measure of human progress and also accesses such factors as human freedom, dignity and human agency, that is, the role of people in development”.

Despite Jamaica’s puzzling ranking, University of the West Indies Professor Trevor Munroe, elaborating on the report, told the news conference that Jamaica come out favourably, in some areas.

“The report leaves no doubt whatsoever that Jamaica is a democracy,” he said, noting Jamaica received the second highest score possible on its political rights and civil liberties.

Since last year’s report, Jamaica has “more or less remained where it was”, he said, after having seen “a very slow but steady increase” in its development index over the past 10 years.

Among other things, Munroe said, Jamaica needs to improve its security forces and achieve greater transparency in government.

Referring to the report’s warning that a wave of democracy-building in the 1980s and 1990s has stalled, Munroe said: “It’s almost a theme: The world has never appeared to be more free, but at the same time more unjust.”

The report, along these lines, suggested the need for a “level playing-field” in international trade organisations and tariffs, which are favouring rich nations, Munroe said.

Developed countries, he complained, “are subsidising their agricultural producers to the tune of US$1 billion per day, while at the same time we are being required, to one degree or another, to assure that our producers are not subsidised”.

“The report is a must-read for all those who wonder why it is so hard for our workers and our farmers and our producers and manufacturers and merchants to move further along the road of human development.”

Regarding the Caribbean, Munroe said the report “confirms that small island states are at a deep disadvantage in the present world order”.

“It is unequal. Power is distributed in favour of the rich, the powerful, and the few states that are industrialised, but, nevertheless, what this report shows is that small island states can make it, even in an unequal world without a level playing-field,” he said.

In the Caribbean, he said, it’s important “not to have a victim’s psychology”, because the report “confirms that small island states, with effort, with cohesion … can, in fact, achieve high levels of human development”.

“We in the Caribbean need to complain about the inequities, and we are doing so,” he said.