To save the world, start by saving the children

Capital Eye by Randi Bjornstad

There’s been a lot of political talk lately about the moral and economic duty of “first world” nations to forgive the huge international debts owed by poverty-stricken African countries, as well as to do something about the huge numbers of African children who have been orphaned by AIDS and may in fact be suffering from it themselves.

This is all well and good–it’s high time the “haves” took a serious look at their responsibility to share some of their incredible wealth with those who haven’t any, at least in part because of the exploitation of the Third World by those with the means to do it.

Even before the topic became a main item on the July agenda of the wealthy, mostly western industrialized nations that make up the “G8,” moves had been underway in the U.S. Congress to address the issue.

Earlier this year, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Rep. Barbara Lee of California–the former a Republican and the latter a Democrat–sponsored companion bills S. 350 and H.R. 1409, to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of

1961 by authorizing federal funding of non-governmental organization programs in developing countries “to provide basic care and services for orphans and other vulnerable children.”

The money would be used to remove barriers to education, such as tuition for schools. It would also supply funding for adequate nutrition, job training, psychosocial support and medical care for HIV/AIDS and other health problems. Finally, it would pay to protect and promote the inheritance rights of orphans and other vulnerable children and their mothers.

These, of course, are not only noble but honorable aims, especially, as Lugar and Lee assert in their bills, because there are more than 143 million orphans living in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, of whom 16 million have lost both parents.

“Extended families and local communities are struggling to meet the basic needs of orphans and vulnerable children,” the legislation says, but “Famines, natural disasters, chronic poverty, ongoing conflicts and civil wars in developing countries are adversely affecting children in these countries, the vast majority of whom currently do not receive humanitarian assistance or other support from the United States.”

However, the problems faced by children in today’s world go far beyond those enumerated in Lugar’s and Lee’s orphan-related bills. The Canadian-based Organization for the Protection of Children’s Rights has amassed dozens of statistics, from the United Nations and other sources, showing just how tough it is to be a child in many places around the globe.

More than half the children in the world have no safe water supply or adequate sanitation to ward off disease, the OPCR says, and every day–every day–30,000 children die of preventable diseases, including one of every 12 children under age five years.

In contrast to this country, the rest of the world has about 186 million children below age 15 in the labor force, more than half of those under age 12, many in hazardous occupations.

More than 650 million children live in “abject poverty,” meaning their family income is less than $1 per day. War has injured or permanently disabled more than six million children, and 11 million live as refugees.

UNICEF estimates that worldwide, 100 million children live on the streets, half of them in Latin America.

When you consider how little it costs to provide housing for a family and education for children in many of these places, it’s unconscionable not to do it–immediately.

Helping all of these children should be near the top of our national agenda–right behind seeing to it our own children have the basic necessities of life and learning–for a number of reasons.

First of all, it’s the right thing to do, for the rich to share with the poor, the strong to lift up the weak, the healthy to nurse the ill.

Beyond that, it’s in our own self-interest to see that the generations coming up have no grounds to hate us for our greed and every reason to respect us for our generosity.

This is especially true as birth rates continue to fall in the industrialized nations and the percentage of the world’s population that lives in want continues to increase dramatically.

It’s hard to argue that there’s something wrong when the richest one percent of people controls the same amount of assets as the poorest 57 percent.

History is full of examples of the “have nots” rising to claim their share, and the narrative is rarely pleasant.