Healing Our World Commentary: Children: Silent Victims of Global Greed

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

Children: Silent Victims of Global Greed

You may think
I am a shadow,
But inside
I am a sun.
-- Damia Gates (Grade 4, Allendale Elementary School, California)

Every hour of every day, children die all over the world because of short sighted political choices that keep toxic substances steadily flowing into our air, water, and food and keep the world's water supplies clouded with human waste. You don't hear about them on the evening news, all these dead children. They are just considered the necessary consequences of progress and the unequal distribution of wealth in our world.

How water pollution begins in a Philippine town. (Photo courtesy Mercy in Action)

That number increases dramatically if you include those poisoned by industrial wastes contaminating water worldwide.

The people of the United States are not immune. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in the mid-1990s that 53 million people in the U.S., about 20 percent of the population, have been drinking water that is contaminated with feces, radiation, lead, or other poisons.

Two to four million children each year die from diarrhea caused by diseases transmitted in polluted drinking water. This is nearly one fourth of all child deaths in the world.

This is not a necessary consequence of living in a country that is less technological than the United States. These senseless deaths are the direct result of the greed of the government leaders in the more developed countries who choose to increase their profits rather than clean up water supplies and build the necessary sanitation systems.

Diarrhea from bad drinking water is the leading cause of death in the world for children. In developing countries, infectious diseases, many of which are caused by polluted drinking water systems, account for 42 percent of all deaths compared to 1.2 percent in the more developed countries.

The World Health Organization estimates that each year, over 10 million children under the age of five die of mostly preventable infectious diseases. That's 27,000 every day!

A young girl and a river of raw sewage in Iraq. (Photo courtesy Voices in the Wilderness)

The industrialized countries stand by and watch as this worldwide tragedy goes on every moment of every day. Most leaders would say it would cost too much to fix this global problem.

In fact, providing clean water is not all that expensive. For example, a joint program of the Indian government, the United Nations Children's Fund and local nongovernmental organizations supplied water to 550 million Indians by providing 2.2 million hand pumps. The annual cost was $4 per person.

Contrary to what you may hear from politicians, there is plenty of money available in the world to stop this tragedy. The World Game Institute estimates that all of the world's people could be provided with enough water to meet their personal needs for an investment of $10 billion per year for 10 years. Their figures assume an investment of about $50 per person for water, sanitation materials, and training.

This is about 1.2 percent of the world's total annual military expenditures, or about one percent of what is being spent on illegal drugs in the world each year. It is also about 15 percent of what the people in the U.S. spend each year on alcohol and tobacco. Many billionaires in the U.S. alone could write a check for this amount today and not feel the loss.

A water reservoir built in Africa through donations by Malidoma Some. (Photo courtesy Malidoma Some)

Yet the rhetoric of our political leaders is designed to make us believe that solving problems such as this is impossible. We are made to feel hopeless and helpless, doomed to work in underpaid, unsatisfying jobs to earn enough to provide the bare minimum for our families. How can there be time or money to help those unfortunate enough to be born outside of the United States?

There must be time spent and there must be money spent on these global problems. If we allow our leaders - and ourselves - to choose to ignore these issues, what kind of statement are we making about the priorities of our lives?

What could possibly be more important that providing something as fundamental as clean water to the people of the world? Is any company's annual report to their stockholders worth a mountain of bodies of dead infants?

The silence and acceptance must end, today. I don't know how much more of this our souls can bear.

RESOURCES

1. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Demand that they fund clean water efforts throughout the U.S. and the world. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

2. South Africans suffer intensely from drinking water problems. Learn about their plight from the South African Environment Project at: http://www.saep.org/subject/water/water.html

3. The U.S. bombing of Iraq's power plants and infrastructure during the Gulf War destroyed the country's water purification and distribution system and may be responsible for the deaths of over 500,000 children. Track this through Voices in the Wilderness at: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/

4. Follow the work of Echoes of the Ancestors, Inc., a non-profit group headed by African scholar and activist Malidoma Somé, at: http://www.malidoma.com/Malidoma/

5. See some examples of U.S. water contamination incidents at: http://www.all-natural.com/water.html

6. The Rotary Doctor Bank is one of the many humanitarian organizations trying to do something about water issues in lesser developed countries. See their efforts at: http://www.rotarydoctorbank.org/99i/db_99_3a.htm

7. See UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2000 report at: http://www.unicef.org/sowc00/

8. Legalized water pollution continues around the world in the form of fluoridation. Marketed by some health professionals as a preventative for tooth decay, studies have shown that the incidence of dental problems is fluoridated populations is no different from that of non-fluoride users. Yet cities around the world use toxic waste from the fertilizer industry in the form of hexafluorosilicic acid and its sodium salt, disodium hexafluorosilicate. These chemicals are derived from phosphate fertilizer industry and contain impurities which are known to cause cancer. Stay in touch with this issue through Citizens for Safe Drinking Water at: http://www.nofluoride.com/

[Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found marveling at all the suffering that takes place amidst the grand abundance of our Earth. Send your thoughts and ideas to him at jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com]