The Wealth Gap (From Free the Children by Carl Keilburger Harper Collins Publishers, 1998) Poverty is the biggest killer of children. It is the strongest driving force of exploitative child labour. We must challenge government leaders and the citizens of the world to make the elimination of poverty their number-one priority. -More than 1.3 billion people (one quarter of the world’s population) live in absolute poverty, struggling to survive on less than a dollar per day. Seventy per cent of them are women and children. -Thirty-five thousand children die every day as a result of poverty. -The wealthiest 20 per cent of the world’s population has sixty times as much wealth as the poorest 20 percent, and the gap is growing every day. At a meeting of the UN General Assembly nearly thirty years ago, rich countries promised to give 0.7 per cent of their gross national product (GNP) as development aid to the poorest countries. With the exception of a couple of the Scandinavian countries, it is a promise that they’ve failed to keep. The country that gives the lowest proportion of its GNP in aid is the United States. It is the richest country in the world, but it gives only 0.1 per cent of GNP in development aid. Denmark ranks at the top of the list, giving 1 per cent, a rate ten times higher than that of the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has admitted that “the gap between the rich countries and the poor, strong nations and weak, is far too wide.” Yet Canada has been cutting back development aid. It was projected to sink to 0.24 per cent of GNP in 1998/99, the lowest level since 1991. It is estimated at present that only about 10 per cent of development aid from industrialized countries goes towards basic human needs such as primary education, health care, nutrition, and clean water. That is because many industrialized countries require that a large portion of their aid be used to increase exports from the recipient country. People say, “We can’t end world poverty, it just can’t be done.” But the 1997 UN Human Development Report carries a clear, well documented message that world poverty can be ended – if we make it our goal. It states that the world has the material and natural resources, the know-how, and the people to make a poverty-free world a reality in less than one generation.