The strategy to reduce and eliminate child poverty problem includes provision for universal child benefits, provision of basic education for all children, including preschool education, much closer coordination among all the agencies concerned, improved statistics and monitoring systems and respect for childrenÕs rights.

Have you noticed more children working on the streets selling packets of tissues, bottles of water or whatever else they can carry in their little hands?
It’s no surprise because more than 27 percent of Turkish children under the age of 15--some 5.6 million--live in poverty, meaning their caregivers do not have enough means to feed, clothe, shelter, educate or protect them, reported Todayszaman.com.
According to the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), about 20 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2005--with a devastating impact on the children affected.
“Their parents may not be able to send them to school regularly due to the cost of clothes, transport, meals and supplies. Poor families often give priority to boys, with the result that girls never attend school, or drop out at an early age. Even if they attend school, children in poverty are often excluded from the social, cultural and recreational activities in which other children take part. Poverty is also the main cause of child labor,“ said Lila Pieters, program coordinator for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which marked October 17 as International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
The Turkish Ministry of Labor and Social Security has been developing a strategy to combat child poverty, and officials said the new government is to continue with the program.
“We’re about to finish the main strategy paper which includes child poverty, and we’ll sign the Joint Inclusion Memorandum (JIM) at the end of 2007,“ said Cafer Yilmaz, head of the Ministry’s European Union Coordination Center, adding that the government is committed to the plan.
Turkey and the EU have identified disadvantaged children as a vulnerable group in the draft JIM, a strategic document which is being drawn up as part of the EU accession process and which will serve as a basis for future Turkey-EU cooperation in the social sector.
According to the plan, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security--along with the Social Services and Child Protection Agency (SHCEK) and other government agencies, local authorities, civil society organizations, academics, the EU, UNICEF, parents and children--will help design a strategy to reduce and eventually eliminate the child poverty problem.
The strategy includes provision for universal child benefits, provision of basic education for all children, including preschool education, much closer coordination among all the agencies concerned, improved statistics and monitoring systems and respect for children’s rights, including child participation.
Existing policies to lessen poverty include the “green card“ scheme for access to health services, including children and the “conditional cash transfer“ payments made to families who send their girls to school or take up basic health services, and the assistance provided through the Social Assistance and Solidarity Fund.
“To financially support disadvantaged children, we provide school supplies at no cost. We also support the Haydi Kizlar Okula! (Let’s go to school, girls!) education campaign. We support about 14,000 children with monthly payments without separating them from their parents,“ SHCEK head Ismail Baras said, emphasizing that poor families have been supported too.
However, childhood poverty is not only the result of parents’ inability to provide for their offspring, said Basak Ekim from Bogazici University’s Social Policies Forum. “Combating child poverty requires a multidimensional approach to the problem. Poor children do not have access to health care services and education. A social state policy that puts children at the center of those policies is necessary,“ she said. Ekim also said even general economic development of the country is not sufficient to prevent poverty if the development is not reflected in the actual policies. “Distributing school supplies to the needy is an important policy. There could also be free lunch service in the schools, because most of these children come to school without having had a decent breakfast.“

Enthusiasm tempered with notes of caution has characterized the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) Business Forum, held in Johannesburg in the run up to the latest heads of state summit of the three countries, reported Ipsnews.net.
Roughly two hundred delegates were in attendance at the forum last Tuesday, many eager about the prospects for increasing trilateral trade. At the same time, they were acutely aware of barriers that still hinder progress.
“The current level of trade amongst the three countries is very low, dismally low, and business is worried about those levels of trade amongst the three countries,“ Jerry Vilakazi, chief executive officer of Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), told IPS, adding that only two percent of the combined foreign trade of the three states was conducted with each other. BUSA speaks for South African business on matters that concern it nationally and internationally.
Vilakazi said that more needs to be done to help business people in the IBSA nations recognize opportunities for trade and investment. “We need to understand: What are the trade opportunities that we have not leveraged within the three countries?“
To achieve this understanding, Vilakazi believes business people should meet each other more often between the heads of state summits, and hold special sessions dedicated to exploring trade opportunities.
Sceptics claims that IBSA trilateral trade is unlikely ever to reach heights that would challenge existing trade links with the industrialized North, because all three states essentially have emerging economies that produce similar exports.
However, this point of view was rejected by Habil Khorakiwala, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, who argued that there is in fact “a great degree of complementarily“.
He also identified four areas where, in his view, there is considerable scope for synergy between the three countries: agriculture and food processing, pharmaceuticals, transport and energy.
Khorakiwala pointed out that India has a “huge energy deficit“ while Brazil is a world leader in biofuels, and South Africa has developed innovative methods of producing synthetic fuels from coal. He believes that these differences in the energy sector provide ample opportunity for more South-South cooperation.
Khorakiwala, who also heads up a large pharmaceutical company in India, believes that although all three IBSA members manufacture pharmaceutical products, there is room for trade in this sector because they do not turn out the same products.
He noted, however, that trilateral trade is being seriously impeded by the inadequate transport links between India, Brazil and South Africa. It is notoriously difficult to book a flight between India and South Africa, and equally difficult to find a seat on the daily flights between South Africa and Brazil.
While the airline companies are eager to take advantage of the rising demand for travel between the IBSA countries, governments have been slow to negotiate and approve routes and landing rights. South African Trade and Industry Minister Mandisi Mpahlwa made a commitment to the forum to address this issue.
He also promised to deal with another complaint voiced by several Indian businessmen, concerning difficulties in arranging visas to visit South Africa. They said this had discouraged many of them from exploring business opportunities here.
Mpahlwa said that South-South trade was growing rapidly. He acknowledged, however, that there are still far more barriers to trade between countries of the South than there are for their Northern counterparts.
He also recognized that in many cases it is non-tariff barriers--bureaucracy and regulations--that have the greatest dampening effect on trade between developing nations.
Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Luiz Inacio da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India signed a number of important agreements when they meet in the South African capital, Pretoria, last Wednesday. These accords are stepping stones towards a free trade agreement covering all three countries.
Wednesday’s gathering was the second IBSA summit.
IBSA was established in 2003, amidst hopes that the three regional powers could boost South-South cooperation and trade.

Now the Communist Party is embracing businessmen in its drive to modernize the country--but it faces growing accusations of corruption.
In the provincial town of Liuzhou, 1,200 miles south of Shanghai near the Vietnamese border, town officials held a banquet for GM executives and journalists to celebrate GM’s investment in a new engine plant at formerly state-owned Wuling, China’s leading maker of small minivans.
According to Bloomberg.com, leading the toasts was Liuzhou’s most important official, who hailed GM’s investment and hoped that more multinationals would invest in Guangxi Province to help boost people’s standard of living.

State-Directed Capitalism
The auto industry encapsulates all the strengths and weaknesses of China’s state-directed capitalism. Car production in China is growing so rapidly that it is set to overtake the US within a decade as the world’s largest market, and multinationals are flooding in to invest.
But all foreign multinationals must find a Chinese joint-venture company, which takes a majority stake in the business, and nearly all these Chinese companies are state-owned. In Shanghai, GM was lucky to find Shanghai Automotive (SAIC), China’s largest car company, as its partner.
As SAIC was owned by the Shanghai municipal government, it found no difficulty in finding new sites to expand its business in the new Pudong district.
And it had no problems getting suppliers as the government even owned its own parts company.
The Shanghai government was also instrumental in helping the other early investor in Shanghai Automotive, Volkswagen, with its markets. All 20,000 municipal taxis in Shanghai are Volkswagens and made locally.
In return for its help, the government requires foreign car companies to share their modern technology with the state companies, thus helping them modernize both the production line and introduce new equipment in the cars. GM has no regrets about its relationship with a state-run, party-controlled business.

Uncontrolled Expansion
The symbiotic relationship between foreign multinationals and local party officials also applies even more to overseas Chinese businessmen, who are being enticed to invest back in the mainland.
Much of Shanghai’s property boom has been fuelled by Hong Kong Chinese investors, who have built many of the huge shopping malls and skyscrapers that have transformed the city.
And as the Chinese government owns all the land in the city, property developers are sold mere leases, which are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The profits from the sales go to the municipal government, which has used the money to build the vast new infrastructure of roads, ports, airports and 12 underground lines which has transformed the city.
Until recently, it was relatively easy for the government to clear the land it wanted for development, relocating thousands of Shanghai residents to new housing on the outskirts of the municipal region. And its control of the planning system meant that there was no conflict, and no delay, over planning permission.
It was in the interest of the government--bent on the expansion of Shanghai--to get the maximum value out of each site’s land value, by building high-rise apartments for the rich or commercial office blocks.

Crackdown
But the system also encouraged corruption.
Businessmen were encouraged to join the party, while insider deals were common. Last September, the secretary of the Shanghai municipal committee of the Communist Party, Chen Liangyu, was sacked from his post for corruption.
He has been accused of diverting money from Shanghai’s $1.2 billion pension fund to help finance building projects through dummy companies controlled by him and his business allies.
The dismissal and trial of Chen is part of a broader campaign by the Chinese government to stamp out the perception of widespread corruption among party officials.

Unbalanced Growth
Beyond the corruption scandals, there is a bigger problem for China’s state-directed capitalism.
That is the competition between regions for economic growth and--ironically--the inability of the central government to prevent overexpansion.
Shanghai’s premier state-owned company had traditionally been Baosteel, now the world’s fifth-largest steelmaker, which also supplies the Shanghai car industry with its basic raw material.
Baosteel has been on an aggressive expansion program--as have other Chinese steel companies, buying up other companies and listing some of its shares on the Hong Kong market.
It has plans to double steel production again, buying iron ore companies in Brazil and building a huge new plant in Shenzhen, the booming province near Hong Kong.
And those plans were strongly backed by the Shanghai party, which had close ties to Baosteel’s boss, also a party member.
But the virtual doubling of steel production by China has led to a glut of steel on the world market, as well as questions as to whether the breakneck expansion can continue.
For now, China’s booming economy is absorbing all the steel it can produce, despite the attempts by central government to slow growth by raising interest rates.
But if growth were to slow, the damage to Baosteel’s balance sheet and its workforce could be severe.
And then, the competence of the party to run the economy--even with the advice of businessmen--could come under fire.