Unicef: Global trade keeps a billion children in poverty

I'm thinking this story will get somewhat less coverage in the US media than the abuse lawsuit against Liza Minelli. There's a certain price to be paid for ignoring such terrible suffering inasmuch as some kinds of rising tides sink all boats. Hard to imagine our delusional bubble world of infinite prosperity won't be popped fairly soon.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=455868

International targets to reduce child poverty are going to be missed because globalised trade and cuts to aid budgets are creating an ever-greater chasm between the richest and poorest countries.

More than one billion young people in the developing world are now living in conditions of severe deprivation, according to a report for the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef). Tens of millions of children in developing countries still do not have access to basic human needs such as food, water and sanitation, the study found.

The report is the first attempt to scientifically measure world poverty, and paints a grim picture of how little the lives of the world's poorest people have improved in the last few years.

A UN declaration in 2000 pledged that by 2015, it would halve the proportion of people whose income was less than one dollar a day and achieve a similar reduction in the number of people suffering from hunger. The declaration also pledged to cut the death rate among the under-fives by two thirds and ensure that all children could complete primary school.

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Judith Melby, spokeswoman for the charity Christian Aid, said: "In many countries, poverty is increasing rather than decreasing, particularly in relation to things like malnutrition among the under-fives.

"We have to look at how globalisation has affected these countries. There is a real link between that and poverty levels. They are put under enormous pressure to liberalise their markets, then they lose their indigenous trade to subsidised markets in the EU and the US; and the poorest people, such as subsistence farmers, are left with absolutely nothing."

Let's stop all global trade and find out how many millions more die every year from starvation...

Nobody, not even the farthest left of the left, is talking about stopping all global trade.

A billion impoverished kids is kind of a big number. I searched Google for "unicef poverty" and found seven stories, none originating in the US media.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&num=30&newsclusterurl=http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/world/newsid_3203000/3203985.stm

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