Children hardest hit by world recession

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 35

Children hardest hit by world recession

NZPA - ReuterUnited Nations, New York Global recession has caused increased infant mortality in the Soviet Union and parts of the United States, smaller babies in Brazil, shorter-than-average children in Zambia, and severe malnutrition among Costa Rican youth, a United Nations report has said. It cited Alabama and Michigan as states that had been particularly hard hit by recession, where infant deaths had risen.

The report called, on international financial institutions to stop imposing the main burden of the recession on the poorest people and protect high-priority social and health services. James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (U.N.1.C.E.F.), who issued the document, said that until now not a single study had looked at the economic impact on “the most vulnerable half of the world’s people — the children.” Mr Grant said that the poor everywhere spent a greater part of their income on such necessities as food, fuel and medical care than did the rich.

“Any decline in that income, therefore, threatens not just material progress but the ability to maintain health and life,” he said. “In such circumstances, the risk is greatest to the growing minds and bodies of young children.”

Mr Grant said that many mechanisms of the international economic system were responsible for passing on the greatest burden of the recession to those least able to sustain it.

“Ironically, the main protection for the very poor has been the fact that so many of them live in rural areas which are only peripherally linked to the world economy.” But in the last two years they, too, had suffered as a result of drought and poor harvests.

“Africa, the continent with the least to fall back on, has undoubtedly been hardest hit in recent years,” he said. “Real per capita income in more than half the countries of Africa is less today than 10 years ago.”

Mr Grant said that the impact differed from one nation to another, but most countries for which there were data showed increases in the number of children living below national poverty lines, and widespread reductions in the quality of children’s lives.

“Internationally, protecting and improving the lives of children could be helped by ending recession and reviving economic activity through the lowering of interest rates, import duties, and trade restrictions by the industrialised nations,” Mr Grant said.

“At the same time, the immediate policy of the main international financial

institutions needs to be reviewed to stop the main burden of recession from falling on the poorest people and to protect high-priority social and health services.” He observed that such appeals echo emptily down the corridors of power. Bad as the deterioration in the lives of children was, the worst was yet to come, said Mr Grant, since the impact of a recession took time to subside.

Already, the poorer northern regions of Zambia reported a fall in children’s height-for-age, while in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, the proportion of lowbirthweight babies was rising and in Costa Rica the number of malnourished children had doubled.