UNICEF Report Reveals the Cause of AFRICA and the World’s Crisis.

Richard Mellor

Retired member, AFSCME Local 444

Oakland CA

10-09-04

The UNIFEC report published today has some very interesting statistics on infant mortality. The U.N. has a goal of cutting child deaths by two thirds in the next ten years but these proclamations have been an ongoing and failing episode in the struggle against hunger and poverty worldwide. The U.N. is a capitalist’s club and capitalism is incapable of solving poverty, death and hunger even in the most industrialized of nations, but in the Third World, or what the WHO calls developing countries, (what they are developing in to is another matter) the crisis is catastrophic.

The report claims that deaths of children under the age of five averaged 158 per 1000 births in the world’s poorest countries in 2002. In industrial countries the figure is 7 per 1000 and 90 per 1000 for the remaining poor countries. The worst cases are sub-Saharan Africa with 174 and Sierra Leone that has the world’s highest child mortality rate where almost one in five children die before their fifth birthday. Africa bears the brunt of this disaster.

The reports explanation for these tragic death rates of much of the world’s children is interesting. Nearly a quarter of the deaths occur at birth or right after due to lack of healthcare including doctors. Acute respiratory infections account for 18% diarrhoea 15% and malaria 10%. The biggest killer is malnutrition that accounts for over half (54%) of the deaths. HIV/Aids accounts for 4% of the deaths according to the reports findings.

What is interesting about these figures is that if you asked most people what they believed was the cause of these deaths in Africa, they would say it was AIDS or HIV or a combination of these two. But if we add up some of these figures it is clear that over 80% of these deaths are caused by something other than HIV/Aids. Yet, to most people, HIV/AIDS is the major, and in many cases, only health issue in the world today of any real significance. Even George Bush talks about it.

The HIV/AIDS issue is a controversial one and this writer is one of those who has come to question the official HIV=AIDS=Death view. But regardless of which side of this issue one is on, these figures reveal one important fact. The main reason for this crisis in these countries is how society is organized, not this or that disease. Malnutrition, malaria, lack of medical care and facilities, these are not problems that cannot be solved quite easily. What I mean by this is that the resources exist for solving them. The problem is that the catastrophic infant death rate in Africa is a product of capitalism, of the market economy, above all else.

Capitalism is an economic system, a system of production. It is a way of producing, distributing and exchanging the necessities of life that human society creates. It has not existed for time immemorial but followed Feudalism and Slavery and the primitive communist societies that preceded them. But like these societies, capitalism has laws and contradictions within it. The resources that can stop the deaths of these children, that can eliminate poverty, that can provide decent drinking water and housing and food to the world’s people, are the private property of the capitalist class and they will not release these resources without compensation. But capitalism produces more than can be bought back, can be paid for by the workers of the world, therefore we starve while there is too much food. We die of thirst when there access to water, we get sick when the technology exists to heal us.

Corruption, disease, racist arguments (they can’t govern themselves) are all used to explain the failings of a system that cannot provide a decent life for the majority of the world’s people and is destroying the planet in the process. This is not an accident but a conscious strategy. The capitalist class owns the media, the airwaves, they do not want discussions about the system itself, about how society is organized and whether or not it has always been organized this way. The universities and schools perpetuate this method of thinking; we are all in control of our own destiny when in fact we have free will but, as Marx pointed out, we make choices but not under conditions of our own choosing. If and when the capitalist system of production itself is referred to it is always described as a product of human nature and a permanent fixture rather than a product of the development of productive forces over a historical period. Obviously, if we believe that society cannot be changed then why try changing it.

UNICEF executive director, Carol Belamy had this to say, “A child’s right to survive is the first measure of equality, possibility and freedom. It is incredible that in an age of technological and medical marvels, child survival is so tenuous in so many places, especially for the poor and marginalized.”

It is not so much incredible but a natural outcome of an economic system where the forces of production, what we produce, and how we produce it are owned by a small group of private individuals. The solution to the infant death crisis and all aspects of global poverty and hunger is for the collective ownership of human wealth and it’s production and distribution to take place in a planned and rational way. Soviet totalitarianism did much to discredit Marx’s ideas and prevent workers’ like myself from exploring them and what a socialist society would mean for humanity, but the distortion of truth doesn’t turn it in to lies.