DEVELOPMENT: Children Live in Poverty Amidst Plenty

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 18 1999 (IPS) - Some 1.5 trillion dollars slosh around global currency markets daily while more than 1.2 billion people – including 600 million children – throughout the world , live on less than a dollar a day, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Monday.

Pointing to this paradox, and the growing inequities between the world’s rich and poor, UNICEF said that in 1960 the income gap between the richest one-fifth of the world’s population and the poorest was 30-1. In 1977 it was 74-1.

While the average per capita income in 40 countries had grown by more than 3.0 percent each year since 1990, 55 countries saw seen a decline during the same period and more than 80 countries now had per capita incomes lower than a decade ago, UNICEF said.

“The world has the resources and experience to know what works for children. The time has come for us to put our words into action,” said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy.

“If we do,” she predicted, “we can make significant changes for children within a single generation.”

In its annual “State of the World’s Children, 2000” UNICEF said that children and women were the first to suffer when crises ripped the covers off seemingly prosperous countries to reveal the poverty that existed.

Although the financial crisis, which began in mid-1997, appeared to be subsiding in East Asia, the human crisis continued, according to the study.

Twelve percent of the populations of both South Korea and Thailand had fallen into poverty and once again, women and children had borne the brunt, the report said.

Between April 1997 and April 1998 in South Korea, employment dropped by 7.0 percent among women compared with 3.8 percent job loss for men.

Among students, the high school drop-out in South Korea rose 36 percent, while in Thailand, as many as 130,000 students left school. In Indonesia, with parents unable to afford school fees, about 20 percent of all girls and 14 percent of the boys in the poorer areas of Jakarta dropped out of junior secondary schools in 1998.

“The rising number of uneducated children threatens to create a lost generation, ensuring that the fallout of the current crisis will endure for generations,” the study said.

Similarly, the economic turmoil in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had caused 120 million people, almost 30 percent of the people in the region, to sink into poverty since 1990.

Again, children figured prominently among the victims. In the Russian Federation, 50 percent of families with three or more children, and 72 percent of those with four or more children were impoverished, according to UNICEF.

Even in countries that had robust economic growth, the study said, poverty was paralysing progress – such as in parts of Latin America, where the poorest 20 percent of people shared less than 3.0 percent of national income.

In contrast, the study pointed out, countries such as Costa Rica, Cuba, Sri Lanka and Vietnam had shown that, even against international political odds, consistent policies aimed at providing a solid foundation of social services paid off, in better health conditions and higher literacy rates than those found in many countries with greater economic resources.

In still other countries, “deepening pockets of poverty are masked in average national statistics,” the report said.

In New York city, for example, the percentage of children born into poverty rose from 44 percent to 52 percent from 1990 to 1996, and the number of homeless children rose 21 percent during the same period.

The study also said that the number of people living in poverty continued to increase as globalisation – “one of the 20th century’s most powerful economic phenomena – proceeds along its inherently asymmetrical course.”

Globalisation was expanding markets across national boundaries and increasing the incomes of a relative few while further strangling the lives of those without the resources to be investors or the capabilities to benefit from the global culture, the report said.

“The majority are women and children, poor before, but even more so now, as the two-tiered world economy widens the gaps between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people.”