Will the world honor save the children?

I quote from Charles Kenny's recent "Small World" column in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

Each year about 15 million parents suffer the loss of a child younger than school-age. On June 14-15, health ministers from more than 80 countries, joined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Unicef Executive Director Anthony Lake, met in Washington and issued a call to action for a global effort to fight child mortality. Their goal is for every country in the world to reduce the number of kids who die before the age of five to less than 2 percent by 2035.

I wish I had more faith that the world was doing enough to prevent this continuing holocaust. The numbers are too big for us to understand. I must believe that we would not allow millions of children to die needlessly each year were we to understand. Yet the Millennium Development Goal for child survival, the last such promise made to the world, has not been met by a long shot.

The Senate recently passed the Farm Bill (authorizing food stamps and other expenditures for five years) with a cut in food stamp funding. The House will craft its own bill, and one version would cut food stamp funding by $150 billion. The Republican controlled House seems unlikely to be generous. Republicans are also trying to gut the Obama health care reforms which are beginning to provide medical services to millions of previously uninsured children. If Congress is unwilling to fund the food and medical care our own kids need, how likely are we to provide the foreign assistance to poor kids in poor countries that they will need to stay alive?