People with No Finances during The Financial Crisis

My column is from Honduras and concerns the impact of the global economic crisis on the world’s marginalized people, those who never got near a sub-prime mortgage or a CDO and yet who are now being pushed over the edge toward hunger. Some of the most affected are Haiti and Honduras, because so much of the economies are dependent on remittances and/or exports to the United States.

I hope that the Obama administration — which has frankly not shown huge commitment to development issues so far — will do what it can to ease the affects of the crisis on the poorest countries. In my mind, the main effort should be to prevent a temporary crisis from having permanent effects by forcing kids to drop out of school and by causing infant malnutrition that leads to permanent intellectual deficits.