December 6, 2004
45 mln kids threatened by failed aid promises: Oxfam
Reuters

About 45 million children around the world will die in the next decade because rich countries have failed to meet their aid promises, humanitarian agency Oxfam said on Monday.

About 45 million children around the world will die in the next decade because rich countries have failed to meet their aid promises, humanitarian agency Oxfam said on Monday.

"The world's poorest children are paying for rich countries' policies on aid and debt with their lives," said Oxfam director Barbara Stocking.

In a report titled "Paying the Price", the British aid agency said countries like United States, Germany and Japan had reneged on pledges made in 1970 to make available 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) in aid and as a result up to 45 million children would die by 2015.

"Thirty-four years on none of the G8 members have reached this target and many have not even set a timetable," it said.

The aid budgets of rich nations are half what they were in 1960, Oxfam said, while poor countries are having to cough up $100 million a day in debt repayments.

"For rich countries this is not about charity -- it is about justice," Stocking said. "As rich countries get richer, they're giving less and less. This is a scandal that must stop."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pledged to put the environment and Africa at the top of the agenda for the year Britain is head of the G8 group of industrialised nations.

Oxfam has urged him to use that time to correct the critical imbalance.

"Oxfam is calling British Prime Minister Tony Blair to use all his negotiating power in 2005 to deliver a global deal that cancels poor countries' debt and doubles aid, alongside action to deliver trade justice and make trade fair," it said.

The United Nations is committed to halving world poverty by 2015, but to date is making painfully slow progress towards that goal.

Oxfam said the United States was giving just 0.14 percent of GNI in aid -- one-tenth of what it spent on invading Iraq -- and much aid from the European Union arrived a year late.

It said U.S. aid would not hit the target to halve world poverty until 2040, and Germany would not hit it until 2087. Japan was actually cutting its aid budget.

The report comes as the United Nation's children's rights organisation UNICEF prepares to release its annual report on the state of the world's children on Thursday and as a leading medical journal accused it of misdirecting its efforts.

UNICEF has said the lives of more than 1 billion children are at risk due to poverty, war and disease, with one in six very hungry, one in seven denied health care, one in five denied access to safe water, and one in three having no toilet at home.

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