Suffer the Little Children

Just how much is a child worth? To a father in northern Thailand, 10-year- old Poo was worth $400 when he sold her to a middleman to work in Madame Suzy's Bangkok brothel. To Madame Suzy, Poo is worth $40 a night while she's still young and fresh. But her price will soon come down.

To a quarry owner outside New Delhi, 12-year-old Ballu is worth 85 cents a day, the amount the child earns breaking rocks in an 11-hour shift. "I wanted to become an engineer," says Ballu. He glances sadly at his callused hands. "But now I have crossed the age for studies and will be a stonecutter all my life."

To local bosses in Mexico City, children are worth about $2.80 a day for scavenging food, glass, cloth and bones from three vast municipal dumps. The walls around the dumps enclose homes, families, even a church and a store. Many of the 5,000 children living there attend school in the dumps; they are not tolerated on the outside because of their smell.

Just how much is the very life of a child worth? A 10 cents packet of salt, sugar and potassium can prevent a child from dying of diarrhea. Yet every day in the developing world more than 40,000 children under the age of five die of diarrhea, measles, malnutrition and other preventable causes. An extra $2.5 billion a year could save the lives of 50 million children over the next decade. That is roughly equal, children's advocates note, to the amount that the world's military establishments, taken together, shell out every day.

Last weekend George Bush joined 34 other Presidents, 27 Prime Ministers, a King, a Grand Duke and a Cardinal, among others, at the United Nations for a meeting unlike any in history: the World Summit for Children. The leaders came to discuss the plight of 150 million children under the age of five suffering from malnutrition, 30 million living in the streets, 7 million driven from their homes by war and famine.

Shamed into action, the leaders endorsed a bold 10-year plan to reduce mortality rates and poverty among children and to improve access to immunizations and education. For once, this was more than a political lullaby of soothing promises: the very existence of the extraordinary summit held out hope to those who have fought to make children's voices heard. To lend support, more than a million people held 2,600 candlelight vigils earlier in the week -- in South Korea's Buddhist monasteries, in London's St. Paul's Cathedral, in Ethiopia's refugee camps, around Paris' Eiffel Tower, in 700 villages in Bangladesh.

As the whole world directs its attention, however briefly, to those to whom the earth will soon belong, what kind of leadership can the United States offer? Americans cherish the notion that they cherish their children, but there's woeful evidence to the contrary. Each year thousands of American babies are born premature and underweight, in a country torn by neither war nor famine. The U.S. is one of only four countries -- with Iran, Iraq and Bangladesh -- that still execute juvenile offenders. And nearly 1 in 4 American children under age six lives in poverty. Congressmen wrestling with budget cuts, policymakers musing about peace dividends, voters weighing their options -- all would do well to wonder what sort of legacy they will be leaving to a generation of children whose needs have been so widely ignored. And those needs go far beyond vigils and poignant speeches.