LONDON, England (AP) -- More than half the world's children are suffering the effects of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, denying them a healthy and safe childhood, UNICEF's annual report said Thursday.

The United Nations children's fund report on The State of the World's Children found more than 1 billion children were growing up hungry and unhealthy, schools had become targets for warring parties and whole villages were being killed off by AIDS.
Compiled by UNICEF and researchers at the London School of Economics and Bristol University, the report found more than half the children in developing countries lived in poverty without access to basic goods and services.

It also said:

• One in six children was severely hungry.
• One in seven had no access to health care.
• One in five had no safe water.
• One in three had no toilet or sanitation facilities at home.

The report found 640 million children did not have adequate shelter; 300 million had no access to information such as TV, radio or newspapers and 140 million children, the majority of them girls, had never been to school.

Poverty was not confined to developing countries, the report said, as the proportion of children living in low-income households in 11 of 15 industrialized nations rose in the past decade.

The UNICEF report said the world had the capacity to reduce poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS and improve the plight of the world's children. It said Millennium Development Goals, which aim to improve the world through human development by 2015 and were agreed to by the U.N.'s 191 member states in 2000, could be achieved at an annual cost of $40-$70 billion. In comparison, world spending on military in 2003 was $956 billion.

Because spending on taking lives is so much more sexy than spending on saving lives. Bombing villages makes them like you much more than when you feed their village. Its all about building "mutual respect".

From CNN.com
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