Debt: killer of third world children.

Debt: Killer of third world children

Children are paying the third world debt with their lives: that is the alarming news carried in the hard-hitting 1989 "State of the World's Children", issued, symbolically, for the first time in a third world capital--New Delhi, India.

More than war, flood or famine, the ravages of poverty have caused at least half a million children to die over the last 12 months, as families in developing countries slide back into poverty as a result of these nations' crushing external debt.

Two thirds of these deaths have been in Africa, the rest in Latin America, where higher average incomes mask "the grossest inequalities of any continent", UNICEF reports.

Average incomes have fallen by 10 to 25 per cent throughout Africa and Latin America, the report states. Child malnutrition is rising, while the proportion of 6 to 11-year-olds in school is falling.

The huge debt choking the developing world has forced cutbacks in crucial social programmes. Health budgets in the poorest 37 nations have been cut by as much as 50 per cent, education budgets by 25 per cent.

Despite spectacular advances in immunizations worldwide and in the battle against diarrhoeal disease, the 1980s may be remembered as "a decade of despair". And if the momentum in the UNICEF Child Survival and Development Revolution is not maintained, 18 million children under the age of 5 are expected to die each year by the year 2000.

A new Marshall Plan 

A new "Marshall Plan"--the post-Second World War programme that helped rebuild a war-ravaged Europe--is needed, UNICEF states, as it calls for a new approach to development that unequivocally puts the poor first.

The Fund recommends a 30 per cent debt relief for developing countries, open trade and increased foreign aid--"real aid" earmarked for the poor.

The worst aspects of poverty and underdevelopment could be eradicated by the end of the century if $30 billion to $50 billion a year were invested throughout the 1990s in "real development".

Developing countries themselves could contribute half of the amount, if they shift their priorities from "high-cost services for the few to low-cost services for the many", the report states. The rest would have to come from richer nations.

A brutal halt

External debt has brutally halted several decades of slow but encouraging progress in the developing world.

Other "passive atrocities", as UNICEF describes them: each year 250,000 children go blind for want of a 10-cent vitamin pill or a handful of green vegetables each day; hundreds of thousands more are born with brain damage that a cheap programme to iodize edible salt could have prevented.

And every year, half a million women die from causes related to giving birth, while an estimated 200,000 more die because of illegal abortions.

Good news

But not all is bad news. At the beginning of the 1980s, only 5 per cent of the children in the developing world had been immunized. Today, the figure is 50 per cent and universal immunization--a primary goal of WHO and UNICEF--could be achieved by 1990.

Vaccines are not only saving the lives of some 1.5 million children each year in the developing world but also preventing more than 220,000 new cases of polio.

In 1980, dehydration caused by diarrhoea was killing 10,000 children every day. Now, 25 per cent of all families in poor countries have access to oral rehydration therapy, another major UNICEF project. This simple, cheap and effective treatment is saving almost a million lives each year.