The global financial crisis is likely to dramatically impact the world’s poor in coming months, depriving children of essential services in education and health care, a Vatican official said.
The negative consequences of the economic crisis “exert a more dramatic impact on the developing world and on the most vulnerable groups in all societies”, the Vatican’s permanent observer to United Nations organisations in Geneva Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said.
He spoke at the 10th Special Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva on February 20.
His speech, released by the Vatican, focused on the deeper causes of the economic crisis and its effect on people in developing countries.
Archbishop Tomasi cited predictions that in 2009 the crisis could push more than 50 million people below the threshold of $2 per day, in addition to the 130 million people pushed into poverty in 2008 by rising food and energy costs.
The archbishop said low-income countries heavily depended on two methods of cash flow, foreign aid and remittance pay from citizens working abroad.
That would directly affect the educational, health and nutritional programs funded by aid agencies, as well as the educational opportunities paid for by workers’ remittances, he said.
He said child and adult mortality rates could worsen; he noted that a significant increase in the infant mortality rate in poor countries was forecast for 2009.
Although certain banks and people can be blamed for the crisis, Archbishop Tomasi said a wider cause was the all-consuming nature of the profit motive.
