Yes. Thank you, sir.
I'm just going to start my timer here. I don't want to make the same mistake as last time.
Thanks for having me again. I'm going to speak mostly from the report that I shared with the committee last week about displacement drivers in the NTCA countries, the northern triangle of Central America.
This is a project idea that started when I was in Geneva last summer, talking to people from the UNHCR and IOM about what could be done to ensure that the migration and refugee compacts were successful in addressing migration crises. The main thrust of my argument in that report is that focusing on the expanding displacement crises in our own backyard is not only a humanitarian imperative, but is very much in Canada's national self-interest, and further, that the refugee compacts offer a clear framework for doing so.
I'll just briefly talk about displacement in the NTCA countries, which are El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. They have witnessed a tenfold increase in refugee and asylum seekers from 2011 to 2016, with an estimated 180,000 people displaced in neighbouring states. Over 350,000 people claimed asylum globally from the region from 2011 to 2017, with 130,500 of those 350,000 in 2017 alone. If you imagine a graph, it would be a pretty significant uptick. Women, families and unaccompanied minors are vastly overrepresented in those migration flows.
In addition to that, there are an estimated 715,000 IDPs, internally displaced people, in the region. The fact that governments don't have the capacity and political willingness to address that problem leads some people to estimate that the number of IDPs could be actually twice as high as that.
There are some particularities about displacement in the region that are worth noting as well. Refugees and IDPs in the region are displaced at least twice, on average. The region also has the world's most urbanized displaced population, where about 95% of people there live in urban areas. To put that in context, the next most urbanized refugee and displaced population is in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 68% are in urban and peri-urban areas.
That is important because urban populations make traditional camp-based humanitarian aid for displaced people increasingly challenging. I'm fairly sure I said as much last week, but it's really important to know that we have adequately addressed and diagnosed the problems in the NTCA countries enough to start doing the work. Canada has the expertise and resources to make a significant difference if it makes the decision to do so.
What is driving displacement from the region? We have endemic poverty, corruption, criminality, lack of access to education and services, gender and sexual identity-based violence and discrimination, and weak states.
Violence in the region is really staggering. If you look at the whole Latin American-Caribbean region, it accounts for only 8% of the world's population, but 33% of the world's homicides. That violence is particularly acute in cities. The homicide rate there for young men is 10 times higher than it is for women. It's at 94 in 100,000, on average. That's a homicide rate of one in 1,000 people for young men.
To illustrate how impactful that is, the global peace index estimates that El Salvador lost 49% of its GDP to violence in 2017, making it the fourth worst affected country, on par with South Sudan and behind only Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, that is loss of GDP to violence.
That violence doesn't even tell the whole story. There are 3.5 million people in the region who require HAP humanitarian assistance because of ecological and climatic degradation. As of 2018, the NTCA governments reported losses of 208,000 hectares of agricultural land, leaving 2.2 million people at risk of food insecurity in an area that we call the “dry corridor”, which stretches from the south of Mexico down to Panama.
My research looks at migration from an international relations perspective. The kind of knock-ons that we have from this type of displacement are really important. The images that we're seeing on the border with Guatemala and Mexico, but also Mexico and the U.S., are precisely the kinds of images that gave wind to the Brexit campaign and to far-right victories across Europe.
Not coincidentally, the countries that made the most hay over those migration crises also suffered the least. These are also the same states that are now using the migration compact to whip up fear for electoral gains, which is also a trend that has begun to emerge in Canada.
Containing displacement in a region without a plan can mean a downward spiral as well. Displacement dynamics stress host-state institutions and social cohesion. The impacts are particularly acute because people are moving from low-income countries to low-income countries, so we don't see the complementarian labour skills and labour market that we see when refugees move from poor countries to rich countries with needs in the low- and medium-skilled parts of the labour market.
It also has significant knock-on effects for housing markets, rents and wages at the lowest rungs of the economy.
I'm going to go a couple of minutes over time. Are you going to cut me off?