About 45 million children around the world will die in the next decade because rich countries have failed to meet their aid promises, humanitarian agency Oxfam claimed today.
"The world's poorest children are paying for rich countries' policies on aid and debt with their lives," said Oxfam director Ms Barbara Stocking.
In a report titled Paying the Price, the British aid agency said countries such as the United States, Germany and Japan had reneged on pledges made in 1970 to make available 0.7 per cent of their gross national income (GNI) in aid and, as a result, up to 45 million children would die by 2015.
"Thirty-four years on none of the G8 members have reached this target and many have not even set a timetable," it said.
The aid budgets of rich nations are half what they were in 1960, Oxfam said, while poor countries are having to cough up €75 million a day in debt repayments.
"For rich countries this is not about charity - it is about justice," Ms Stocking said. "As rich countries get richer, they're giving less and less. This is a scandal that must stop."
The United Nations is committed to halving world poverty by 2015, but to date is making painfully slow progress towards that goal.
Oxfam said the United States was giving just 0.14 per cent of GNI in aid - one-tenth of what it spent on invading Iraq - and much aid from the European Union arrived a year late.
It said US aid would not hit the target to halve world poverty until 2040, and Germany would not hit it until 2087. Japan was actually cutting its aid budget.
Unicef has said the lives of more than one billion children are at risk due to poverty, war and disease, with one in six very hungry, one in seven denied health care, one in five denied access to safe water, and one in three having no toilet at home.