By Craig Cormick
In the approximately four minutes it takes to read this article, 100 children will have died from preventable diseases. Are the deaths of 13 million children each year tolerable as we enter our much heralded, and yet ill-defined, New World Order?
In its report The State of the World's Children, 1992, UNICEF says, "... the time has come for the world to recommit itself to meeting basic human needs and building a new world order which will reflect mankind's brightest hopes rather than its darkest fears".
In September 1990, at the World Summit for Children, representatives of 159 nations pledged to implement action plans that would improve the conditions of children by the year 2000. The plan included education, health care, access to clean water and programs to save the lives of the many millions who die each year from easily preventable diseases.
The report says that combining increases in child health care and education with sensible population policies is one of the most effective and least expensive ways of improving the quality of life on earth.
UNICEF estimates that achieving the goals agreed to at the World Summit would cost an extra $20 billion a year throughout the 1990s. This sum could be achieved if developing countries reallocated only 10% of their military spending and developed countries reallocated just 1%.
Statistics set out by UNICEF are depressingly familiar:
- 40,000 people die each day of hunger-related causes, and millions more live with permanent malnutrition.
- In poor countries, up to 75% of public health spending serves only the richest 25% of the population.
- About 40% of government spending is devoted to the military and debt servicing.
- The poorer nations transfer US$50 billion net a year to the rich nations.
- More than a million girls die each year simply because they are born female.
- More than 100,000 young women die each year because they do not have the knowledge or means to plan and space their pregnancies.
However, the report is notable in that it is not a descriptive catalogue of woes, but rather a summary of the steps needed to achieve major global change, including some successful projects already undertaken. One such notable success is UNICEF's immunisation program. In the 1970s, when barely 10% of the world's children were being successfully immunised, UNICEF set a goal of providing 80% immunisation coverage for six basic diseases by the end of 1990.
This goal was reached, and the new target is to provide 90% immunisation by the year 2000. UNICEF estimates that 3.2 million child deaths were prevented in 1991 by vaccination against measles, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, neonatal tetanus and whooping cough.
Another major UNICEF program achieving results is the promotion of family planning, which it says "could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single 'technology' now available to the human race".
The report says that in addition to the 13 million children who die each year before reaching the age of five, about 500,000 women die from causes related to pregnancy and giving birth.
It also says that many of these deaths occur when births are under two years apart, where there have been four or more previous births and where mothers are under 18 or over 35.
The executive director of UNICEF, James Grant, has said that the widespread adoption of sensible and sensitive family planning policies could lead to a one-third reduction in child deaths, a halving of child malnutrition and maternal mortality as well as a significant easing of the pressures on our planet caused by population growth.
Grant said that there was a strong demand for family planning in developing countries, and that research by the World Fertility Survey showed that if all women were able to decide how many children to have and when, the rate of population growth would fall by about 30%.
Stressing that a reduction of child mortality leads to a lessening of birth rates, UNICEF describes its policy as "fewer deaths, fewer births".
Another issue raised in The State of the World's Children is the nature of foreign aid. UNICEF estimates that less than 10% of global aid goes directly to meeting the needs of the poor.
According to the report, Australia spends about 7.7% of its aid budget on meeting basic needs of the poor, Italy 4%, Canada 5.2%, Switzerland 15.8%, the Netherlands 13.6%.