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June 08, 2005
What Did You Do During The Great African Holocaust?
As predicted in the last post, Bush made a sham announcement, announcing money that was already announced, without agreeing to anything else substantive -- in spite of growing demand everywhere in the world to stop this cruel march of death, now. On every major issue on the table, U.S. blocking progress. This is beyond shameful.
This is the greatest crime of our generation.
The director of UNDP, Kevin Watkins, published an op-ed in today's International Herald Tribune. UNDP calculates that 500 children die each hour in Africa due to poverty --which we helped cause through past and current colonialism, and which we could greatly alleviate given our wealth, and given that the IMF --one of the biggest stumbling blocks at the moment-- is basically controlled by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
UNDP estimates that three million children will die each year --each year-- --three million-- -each year-- by 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa unless we change course dramatically, now.
Currently, poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 African children each hour - and the numbers are going up. The United Nations Development Program has just completed a country-by-country assessment of progress in reducing child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The results are not for the faint-hearted.
If current trends continue over the next decade, the region will miss the millennium goals by an epic margin. On our estimates, there will be three million more child deaths in 2015 than there would be if the millennium target were met. By 2015 sub-Saharan Africa will account for two in every three child deaths in the world.
These trends are not destiny. It is difficult to think of any area in which so much could be done to improve human welfare for so little. Consider malaria, which claims the life of one child in Africa every minute. More than three-quarters of these deaths could be averted through a simple net treated with insecticide, costing $3-$5, or simple medicines.
Of course, getting sub-Saharan Africa back on track will take more than initiatives to tackle malaria, AIDS and other major killers. The underlying problem is endemic poverty. Poor households face a double burden: more vulnerable to disease because of malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water, they are also least able to afford treatment and least served by public health systems.
African governments have primary responsibility for developing national poverty reduction plans. But even the best national policies will fail unless Africa can close the chronic financing gaps that restrict opportunities for development.
...The United States, for its part, has increased aid by $8 billion since 2000. Yet the world's largest economy still spends only 0.16 percent of national income on official aid. Indeed, three G-8 countries - Japan, Italy and the United States - are among the nations who give the least aid in proportion to national income.
...
The G-8 summit could also free sub-Saharan Africa, for once and for all, from the shackles of unsustainable debt. All G-8 members agree that more needs to be done on debt. Unfortunately, that is where the consensus ends. There are disagreements over how to pay for World Bank and IMF debt reduction, over whether debt relief should come from existing aid budgets or new resources, and over how much debt relief should be provided. After almost two years of inertia, it is time for the G-8 to agree to a 100 percent debt cancellation.
The world's rich countries have a chance to put in place policies that could prevent three million additional child deaths. Africa's children do not have a voice at G-8 summits. But those avoidable deaths present three million reasons for the rich world to act now, before it is too late.
(Kevin Watkins is the director of the UN Human Development Report Office.)
Can you wrap your head around that? Five hundred children each and every hour. (In the space of four hours, more children will die today in Africa than all the Americans soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion more than two years ago. And this is just Africa. And just children. In four hours.)
A preventable, predictable, steady killing-machine that we helped construct, and that we could easily mute. The numbers are going up. Onward. Upward.
What will we say when future generations ask us what we did during the great African Holocaust?
Posted by zeynep at June 8, 2005 10:20 AM