The human cost of the crisis

When the Asian crisis is calculated in dollars and property values, the picture is bleak enough. But it is the lives of families affected by the economic slump that show the tragedy behind the statistics.

Officials have been warning for some time that in the worst- hit Asian economies, the greatest casualties are children. Undernourished and prey to every infection, babies and toddlers are dying in tens of thousands from diarrhea and other diseases.

In Java, where the charity Helen Keller International carried out a study, it found childhood anemia affected 60 percent of children. Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, warns that the mental and physical growth of those who survive may be stunted.

A similar situation prevails in Cambodia. But there it is political instability that is causing the deaths of mothers and children. The common denominator between the two is the apparent indifference of the authorities to the suffering of the poor. Cambodian political factions wrangle about power sharing while their country collapses; Indonesian officials, tainted by corruption, are too hidebound by red tape to speed the aid where it is needed.

But they are not the only culprits. In handing out inflexible recipes for economic recovery, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also guilty of inflicting suffering on the most powerless sections of these communities.

It is not the mighty nor the middle classes who suffer most when an economy goes into recession. Life may be difficult, but it rarely becomes a matter of survival.

Ecological blight, crop failures and freak weather hit the rural poor. In Indonesia, 17 million families are surviving on handfuls of rice, some cassava and dry biscuits. Their worry is survival, not rental charges or interest rates. A society has the wrong set of priorities when it puts economic targets before the well-being of its children.

And no country can afford to neglect its future, as the coming years will show.

-- The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong