Fifty-million European children poverty-stricken

A new report suggests that as many as fifty-million children may be living in poverty in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The study, from the European Children's Trust, was based on figures gathered between 1993 and 1995.

It says many families are having to leave their children in state orphanages as they are unable to feed them.

And it warns that, with winter approaching, the situation is likely to deteriorate.

The Trust says a crisis has been building since the old communist system disappeared, with more than a-hundred-and-sixty-million people living below the poverty line in recent years -- twelve times more than at the collapse of communism.

The report says Western countries should help expand services preventing family breakdown instead of providing direct aid. The report says eighty-eight percent of the population in Kyrgyzstan live in poverty, while the figure is more than sixty percent in Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service