First Day of School for Some Last Day of Life for Others

I was watching television tonight and there were advertisments about kids going back to school. They were all bright eyed,fed well, and dancing amidst copious amounts of clothes, books,computers and various other things that go with the first day of school. I thought about my own children, when they were young, how we would go shopping and buy them everything they needed for that first day. Then I came across this article aat Global Issues and thought I would include it today.

"Today, over 27,000 children died around the world

Around the world, 27–30,000 children die every day.
That is equivalent to:
1 child dying every 3 seconds
20 children dying every minute
A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring almost every week
An Iraq-scale death toll every 15–35 days
10–11 million children dying every year
Over 50 million children dying between 2000 and 2005
The silent killers are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. In spite of the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage."
Table of contents for this page
This web page has the following sub-sections:
Why is this tragedy not in the headlines?
Recent headlines in context
Notes and Sources
Sources for child deaths
Sources for Asia Tsunami comparison
Sources for Iraq comparison
Related Information

"Why is this tragedy not in the headlines?
UNICEF’s 2000 Progress of Nations report tried to put these numbers into some perspective:
The continuation of this suffering and loss of life contravenes the natural human instinct to help in times of disaster. Imagine the horror of the world if a major earthquake were to occur and people stood by and watched without assisting the survivors! Yet every day, the equivalent of a major earthquake killing over 30,000 young children occurs to a disturbingly muted response. They die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.
— A spotty scorecard, UNICEF, Progress of Nations 2000
Unfortunately, it seems that the world still does not notice. It might be reasonable to expect that death and tragedy on this scale should be prime time headlines news. Yet, these issues only surface when there are global meetings or concerts (such as the various G8 summits, the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005, etc).
Furthermore, year after year, we witness that when those campaigns end and the meetings conclude, so does the mainstream media coverage. It feels as though even when there is some media attention, the ones who suffer are not the ones that compel the mainstream to report, but instead it is the movement of the celebrities and leaders of the wealthy countries that makes this issue newsworthy.
Even rarer in the mainstream media is any thought that wealthy countries may be part of the problem too. The effects of international policies, the current form of globalization, and the influence the wealthy countries have on these processes is rarely looked at.
Instead, promises and pledges from the wealthy, powerful countries, and the corruption of the poorer ones—who receive apparently abundent goodwill—make the headlines; the repeated broken promises, the low quality and quantity of aid, and conditions with unfair strings attached do not.
Accountability of the recipient countries is often mentioned when these issues touch the mainstream. Accountability of the roles that international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and their funders (the wealthy/powerful countries), rarely does. The risk is that citizens of these countries get a false sense of hope creating the misleading impression that appropriate action is taken in their names.
It may be harsh to say the mainstream media is one of the many causes of poverty, as such, but the point here is that their influence is enormous. Slience, as well as noise, can both have an effect." Global Isusues at http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/death

The Third World

Our free enterprise system has killed more people than the Nazis did in World war II. Most third world countries carry a tremendous burden of debt, often times 2/3 of it gross national income. This debt must be forgiven to allow these areas to escape the never ending spiral of poverty,disease and war. Below is a list from the U.N. outlining the poorest countries in the world and the conditions surrounding them.

"World's 50 Poorest Countries
UN list of least developed countries1
Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan, East Timor, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, Tanzania, Vanuatu, Yemen, Zambia.
Trends among the world's poorest countries
In the second half of the 1990s the average per capita income in the world's poorest countries, when measured in terms of current prices and official exchange rates, was $0.72 a day and the average per capita consumption was $0.57 a day. This implies that on average there was only $0.15 a day per person to spend on private capital formation, public investment in infrastructure, and the running of vital public services, including health, education, administration, and law and order.
In 2001, 34% of the population aged between 15 and 24 was illiterate in the poorest countries.
About 60% of the poorest countries experienced civil conflict of varying intensity and duration in the period 1990–2001 that, in most cases, erupted after a period of economic stagnation and regression. In Rwanda, for example, average private consumption per capita fell by more than 12% between 1980 and 1993, the year before the genocide occurred.
1. The UN classifies countries as “least developed” based on three criteria: (1) annual gross domestic product (GDP) below $900 per capita; (2) quality of life, based on life expectancy at birth, per capita calorie intake, primary and secondary school enrollment rates, and adult literacy; and (3) economic vulnerability, based on instability of agricultural productions and exports, inadequate diversification, and economic smallness. Half or more of the population in the 50 least developed countries listed above are estimated to live at or below the absolute poverty line of U.S. $1 per day."
These areas in the world are also political unstable and are strive with civil war adding to the misery of the population. Most of them aspire to democracy but fall short in practice. Usually the countries are ruled by an autocratic form of government. The population are easy prey for illegal activites and often succumb to forms of forced labour. As noted in the above list a majority of the countries are in Africa and southeast Asia.