by Piyaporn Hawiset
June 1999
When Asia's economic gloom was at its deepest in 1998, experts warned of a "Lost Generation" of Indonesian children destined to grow up without hope or opportunity. Unbridled unemployment, soaring prices and a breakdown in food distribution had even raised the specter of starvation. Now, almost two years since those frightening days when everything began to go so wrong so quickly, the worst has appeared to be at last over for the people of Asia. The region is on the mend, albeit slowly and patchily, with South Korea and Thailand leading the way. Even once-mighty Japan appears to be awakening from its mysterious slumber. Confidence is returning - and so are international investors, attracted no doubt by bargain-value assets and the belief that precious lessons about moderation and propriety have been learned all round. But what about the children? Will they, like the economies and the markets, bounce back? In many cases, the answer to that is no.
In his Bangkok office Kul Gautam, regional director for East Asia and the Pacific of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), has watched the social consequences of the economic meltdown with growing concern. He says: "Most people think of the Crisis as affecting the big financial institutions - companies going bankrupt, banks suffering, some rich people becoming poorer and traders losing and gaining. All that is true, but what is often hidden from view is the impact on women and children."
Only now, he says, are the ramifications of this beginning to be properly understood.
"Financial statistics are quickly available and are updated promptly. Social statistics - what happens to malnutrition, what happens to mortality rates, what happens to immunization rates, what happens to school completion - are not available month by month. You usually find that out two years later."
That moment is coming up - and it seems clear Asia's youngsters are paying the cost of the Crisis. Gautam fears many infants under the age of three will be "handicapped for life" because their Crisis-stricken families have not been able to provide them with the healthy food vital for building intelligence and strong bodies.
"The construction of bridges or highways can be put on hold if funds dry up," he says, "but if kids are allowed to be chronically malnourished, there is no way you can fix it later. If you don't do it today, you've lost them for good."
It is not just the very young who will suffer. Countless others, up to and including teenagers, may never fully recover from the chaos that has barged into their lives. Middle-class families have slipped back into near-poverty or worse, forcing parents to accept that their hopes for their offspring will not now be fulfilled. For these youngsters, the future will never be what it seemed certain to be during the times of constant economic growth.
The severity of what has happening to Asia's young varies from country to country and within those countries. The sharpest reversals of fortune are found in Indonesia. In areas where adults are reduced to eating just one meal a day, babies are fed little more than flavored cassava root or a thin gruel. The results are predictable but no less distressing. Says Slamet Riyanto, a health official in Rembang, West Java: "We used to be appalled by pictures of hungry children in Ethiopia. Now our own children look just like that."
In West Sumatra, officials registered about 2,800 infants under five as severely malnourished. Public health expert Agus Zulkarnain reckons as many as 41,000 babies in the province are suffering from marasmus - a condition caused by calorie and protein deficiency, typically producing gaunt features and distended bellies.
Many officials accept that moderate malnutrition is now widespread across Indonesia. This can take insidious forms. Studies by Helen Keller International in 1998 found 65 percent of under-threes in central Java were anaemic - a 25 percent rise from 1997. Anaemic children do not look very different from others, but they often become lethargic and have a reduced capacity for learning.
Thailand - birthplace of the Crisis - has similar problems. In the boom years between 1990 and 1996, the incidence of underweight children below the age of five halved to about 8 percent. By early 1998, the ratio was back up to nearly 12 percent, with two-thirds of the victims in rural areas, mainly in the depressed northeast.
Millions of youngsters are "lost" in other ways - through a lack of education, for example. About 7 percent of the 13.5 million households in the Philippines had to take at least one child out of school in 1998 - mainly because of Crisis-related poverty, but also as a result of jobs wiped out by the drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon. In Thailand, the national education commission estimates at least 130,000 youngsters have dropped out of school because of the effects of the downturn.
Often education is disrupted because of reverse migration. Increasing numbers of workers are moving back to their home provinces as construction jobs and other work disappear in the cities. For the children who follow their parents on a trek from one rural town to another, this can be a wrenching and demoralizing dislocation. One of the consequences: rising school failure rates. Rural households are feeling the pinch too, with children pulled out of school to work on family land. According to the Thai statistics office, there has been a marked increase in 13- and 14-year-olds employed in agriculture, reversing a decades-long trend.
It used to be that nine out of 10 Indonesian children completed primary school. Not now. As many as seven million primary and lower-secondary students may have quit school in 1998, more than double the usual figure. In Jakarta, falling enrolment has prompted the closure of 81 state elementary schools.
"Parents can no longer afford education for their children," says one city official. Instead, they get the youngsters to help out at food stalls, wash cars or take odd jobs. Says Bahar Laut of Jakarta's social and political affairs unit: "When parents don't have money, they will not allow their children to dream."
In an era of globalization, no nation can hope to keep pace with the economic pacesetters if it is loaded down with the burden of millions of illiterate and unemployable young people. So Indonesians know they have to get their kids back to their school desks. That is why local officials and UNICEF enlisted Rano Karno, an actor best known for his role as Si Doel, a village boy who goes on to receive a university education. Rano's TV messages urging parents to keep their children in school have been well received. But for families struggling to survive, television is one thing. Daily reality is another.
Leaner, meaner times are exacerbating traditional forms of discrimination too. In those families that cannot afford to send all their children to school, it is the daughters who are held back. An educated son is seen as an investment. Girls, the thinking goes, can help with younger siblings, household chores or simply be sent out to work. In impoverished families, particularly in urban areas, some end up in prostitution or other kinds of hazardous occupations. Plus: Female members of the family tend to get a smaller share of the food - and their health suffers as a consequence.
Stress related to the Crisis has ripped apart families. About one-third of children in Thai welfare homes were abandoned by their parents. In South Korea, more than 9,000 under-19s were placed in state care in 1998 - up nearly 40 percent from 1997. Latest figures show that 17,800 youngsters are in government shelters, an unthinkable phenomenon in the days when prosperity seemed assured. For these young people, hopes of a new home and a fresh start are slim. Foreign adoptions are viewed as a national shame, and, in a country obsessed with blood ties, Korean parents are reluctant to bring outsiders into their families. Laws covering adoptions were relaxed in 1998, resulting in an increase of about 9 percent in children going overseas, but local adoptions barely increased at all.
In the years to come, the youngsters who remain in South Korea's orphanages will discover they are not accepted by a society that places great stress on family background.
"Orphans usually can't get good jobs and can't marry well," says Park Young Sook, who recently launched the country's first foster-parent association. "Most of these children are doomed to a lowly life."
In Southeast Asia, kids often end up on the streets, selling cigarettes, newspapers, flowers or themselves. The number of urchins in Jakarta has tripled since the Crisis to between 30,000 and 40,000. Some are supplementing household incomes. Others - the runaways and the abandoned - are just trying to survive. Says one seven-year-old waif panhandling at a busy Jakarta intersection: "I have to be courageous. Who else will take care of me if I'm not?" A local juvenile court reported a 10 percent increase in youth crime in the first quarter of 1998.
Falling currencies have pushed up the price of imported medicine and equipment. At the same time, government hospitals came under increasing strain as middle-class families turn to them from more expensive private treatment. Health priorities are being reshaped - and often it's the most vulnerable families that suffer. Indonesia's family-planning program now requires users to pay the full cost of its service. Poor women most in need of this kind of help are dropping out in large numbers. The eventual price of this may be an increase in abortions or even infanticides.
Faced with shrinking budgets, some Asian health officials opt for cures rather than prevention. The Philippines cut its allocation for immunization programs by 26 percent. The budget for preventive care against tuberculosis was down by 36 percent and for malaria by 27 percent. The charity Oxfam estimates that for the latter, the consequence is likely to be 30,000 unnecessary deaths. Vaccinating a healthy baby may not seem as urgent as treating a sick patient, but the long-term costs of not doing so are incalculable.
Similarly, cutbacks on drugs and condom distribution will take a toll on the AIDS fight, as will more youngsters turning to prostitution. As result, the disease could spread even more quickly than in Africa. UNICEF's Gautam reckons that within a decade, as many as one in three of the world's AIDS orphans could be Asian, compared to the current 10 percent.
Gautam argues that Asia's governments can do much more than they are in the areas of social services, primary health care and education.
"The question is where you place your resources, what your priorities are," he says. "That is the real scandal - and it's one we don't speak enough about." The young victims of the economic crisis do not yet have a voice on the matter. When they do, what will they say about the way they were neglected at their time of greatest need?