BEIJING — China has quelled speculation its controversial "one-child" policy is to be scrapped, instead announcing Wednesday that family planning laws to curb the birth rate will remain.

"The policy should be a long-term one and its primary goal is to keep a low birthrate," Wang Xia, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said.

The pronouncement comes after months of speculation that the decades-old restriction would be abandoned.

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In October, a Chinese government think tank urged the policy be relaxed to allow two children for every family in the country by 2015.

"I’m surprised," said Professor Shaun Breslin, associate fellow at U.K. think tank, Chatham House. "Almost everything we had heard in recent months pointed towards a relaxation of one-child."

The 1979 law prohibits about one-third of China’s 1.3 billion citizens from having a second child. The policy is officially backed up by fines, but campaigners say more than one million forced abortions are carried out every year.

It has slowed the spectacular growth of the country’s population, preventing an estimated 400 million births over three decades.

In a related statement on Wednesday, the family planning commission said China’s current low birthrate "is not stable because, with the exception of some developed cities, the fertility level in most of China's regions will rise if the basic state policy of family planning is abolished."

"Therefore it is necessary to stick to the basic state policy of family planning to stabilize the current low fertility level," it added.

Breslin said China’s looming demographic crisis — a huge elderly population supported by a relatively tiny younger generation — highlighted social problems such as the need for greater universal healthcare.

"For most Chinese people the current system works fine if you have a sore throat, but a knee operation could use up all your savings," he said. "That means many are keen to ensure they have a male child in order to ensure there is enough income in the family."

He added that Wednesday’s announcement did not mean China’s new leadership was eschewing economic or social reforms. "It can take a year or two for any new leadership in China to introduce change," he said.

Professor Hu Xingdou, of the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the South China Morning Post it would be difficult for the government to abolish the one-child policy overnight.

"China still needs a family-planning policy due to our vast population and lack of cropland, as well as the relative deficiency of per capita resources,” he said.

The one-child rule is mainly enforced in urban areas.

Wang also announced an expansion of rural healthcare provision for pregnant women, and said efforts "should also be made to rectify the imbalance in gender ratio."

She also said a "complete working system" would be established to "in light of the great numbers of young migrant workers flocking to the cities for jobs."

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Twenty-seven years after Live Aid viscerally brought Africa's famine and poverty home to billions worldwide, the head of a major international charity warned Wednesday that the "depressing" stereotypes left in its wake were counterproductive and risked driving help away.

The British arm of Oxfam International called images of starving babies and other familiar depictions of Africa over the last quarter-century "manipulative and hopeless," desensitizing potential donors and leading them to the conclusion that conditions in the developing world can never improve. 

Oxfam launched a new advertising campaign this week celebrating Africa's natural beauty and progress toward alleviating hunger. Called "Food for All," the campaign features images of lush green scenery, wildlife and thriving African food markets.

The campaign's tagline: "Let's Make Africa Famous for Its Epic Landscapes, Not Hunger."

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Dame Barbara Stocking, the British charity's chief executive, said in a posting on Oxfam's website that "we've come a long way since the 1980s and Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'"

But "we need to shrug off the old stereotypes and celebrate the continent's diversity and complexity," she contended.

Band Aid, the musical charity supergroup formed in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in response to the crippling famine in Ethiopia. In 2004, on the song's 20th-anniversary re-release, the World Development Movement condemned it as "patronizing, false and out of date."

Geldof and Ure organized the landmark fundraising concert Live Aid in 1985, bringing dire conditions in Africa front and center to people around the world.

"'Patronizing' isn't the word" to describe the message fostered by Band Aid and other well-intentioned campaigns, Stocking said Wednesday in an interview on Sky News. "It's just this negativity. ...

"In order for people to understand what's happening in Africa, we've also got to tell the good stories, and there has been good news in Africa," said Stocking, who is retiring in the new year after serving with the charity since 2001. 

"Otherwise, people just feel put off and (believe) there's nothing that can be done about Africa," she said. "And that's the big worry for us — that people feel it's all hopeless, when it clearly isn't."

World Bank statistics indicate that the world's heaviest concentration of malnutrition remains in Africa, afflicting as many as 15 percent of all children under 5 in some countries in the southern and eastern regions. And in June, the U.N. Children's Fund reported that 1.5 million children were at imminent risk of starvation in the western half of the continent.

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But while acknowledging that international aid has made few if any inroads on hunger, Oxfam said in a report this month that countries south of the Sahara Desert had made "one of the most remarkable turnarounds in development ... in the last decade." It called the 22 years from 1990 to 2011 an "African renaissance."

Oxfam: Africa is wide awake but still hungry (.pdf)

"Economies have been growing even in the face of economic and financial instability elsewhere in the world, poverty has fallen and child mortality has dropped considerably, among the most visible indicators of progress," the report said.

The real story, Stocking said Wednesday, is that "aid money is really working."

But in the end, she said, "we don't want to have to give aid money to Africa. We want economic development, enterprise — that's what we're really aiming to do."

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MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- Childhood has never been easy in Afghanistan.

The conflict, drought and poverty are having profound effects on a generation, leaving many families struggling to feed their children.

About 15 million Afghan children are malnourished, according to Save the Children, an international child welfare agency that set out to help rural Afghan communities.

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“What we really need now is the political movement behind this to act to tackle hunger,” said Sarah Jacobs, a spokesman for Save the Children.

ITN’s Emma Murphy visited Afghanistan's second-largest city to learn about a new program by the agency that's making a difference, one mother at a time.

View the video to see Afghan women and relief agencies working together

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Crying as she is put on an electronic scale, two-year-old Rajini's naked shriveled frame casts a dark shadow over a rising India, where millions of children have little to eat.

The children are scrawny, listless and sick in this run-down nutrition clinic in central India with its intermittent power supply. If they survive they will grow up shorter, weaker and less smart than their better-fed peers.

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Rajini weighs 5 kg (11 lb), about half of what she should.

"She's as light as a leaf, this can't be good," says her grandmother, Sushila Devi, poking her rib-protruding stomach in the clinic in Shivpuri district in Madhya Pradesh state.

Almost as shocking as India's high prevalence of child malnutrition is the country's failure to reduce it, despite the economy tripling between 1990 and 2005 to become Asia's third largest and annual per capita income rising to $489 from $96.

1 in 4 children malnourished, global report says

A government-supported survey last month said 42 percent of children under five are underweight - almost double that of sub-Saharan Africa - compared to 43 percent five years ago.

The statistic - which means 3,000 children dying daily due to illnesses related to poor diets - led Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to admit malnutrition was "a national shame" and was putting the health of the nation in jeopardy.

"It is a national shame. Child nutrition is a marker of the many things that are not going right for the poor of India," said Purnima Menon, research fellow on poverty, health and nutrition at the Institute of Food Policy Research Institute.

India's efforts to reduce the number of undernourished kids have been largely hampered by blighting poverty where many cannot afford the amount and types of food they need.

Poor hygiene, low public health spending and little education and awareness have not helped. Age-old customs discriminating against women such as child marriage have also contributed, but are far harder to tackle, say experts.

In addition, shoddy management of food stocks, subsidized carbohydrate-rich food that fuel and fill the poor rather than truly nourishing them and real shortages in its poorest states have worsened the problem.

At the Shivpuri clinic, health worker Rekha Singh Chauhan tends to emaciated young children in a ward with a ganglion of electrical wires running cross its paint-chipped walls.

"We only have a handful to take care of now, but come April, the cases will shoot up," says Chauhan, adding that diseases such as diarrhea and malaria will cause an influx of sick underweight children with the onset of summer.

"The situation becomes bad. Three children are made to share a bed and many have to sleep on the floor."

That picture jars with an India clocking enviable 8-9 percent growth over the last five years that has put money in the pockets of millions of its people and fuelled demand for everything from cars and computers to clothes and fancy homes.

It has also catapulted the country onto the world stage, boosting its claim for a bigger role on forums such as the U.N. Security Council. This month, it moved closer to buying new fighter jets worth a whopping $15 billion.

Yet while the urban middle classes dine in swanky shopping malls where eateries offer everything from sushi to burritos, millions of children are dying due to a lack of food.

Last month's report by the Indian charity Naandi Foundation, the first comprehensive data since a 2005/6 study, said India's "nutrition crisis" is an attributable cause for up to half of all child deaths.

Yet India's public spending on health, estimated at 1.2 percent of its GDP in 2009, is among the lowest in the world.

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"This isn't a quick-fix that we're looking at here, it's not a magic bullet," said Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children International.

"Not just in India, but in countries around the world, we know that you can't just rely on trickle down. There have to be policies in place, there have got to be political choices that prioritize malnutrition."

In Shivpuri, an impoverished tribal-dominated district in Madhya Pradesh state, that reality is on full display.

The region's malnutrition level for children under five matches the national average, but child mortality rates are worse at 103 deaths per 1,000. The national average is 66 deaths per 1,000, according to U.N. children's agency, Unicef.

Most of the children here are from India's most marginalized and poorest communities, such as tribals and lower castes where literacy is poor and poverty high.

Their mothers are themselves often undernourished, forced into early marriage when they reach puberty, and give birth to underweight babies with weak immune systems.

Illiteracy or lack of awareness takes its toll as well. These mothers do not breastfeed, offering buffalo milk and contaminated water instead and making their children prone to illnesses like diarrhea, which prevents nutrient absorption.

Mostly living on less than $2 a day, these families can hardly afford anything beyond wheat chapatis that are devoid of much-needed protein and other nutrients.

Soapy milk, toxic apples: food safety in India

India's neglect of its young - 48 percent are stunted, 20 percent wasted and 70 percent anemic - will have serious repercussions. The World Bank says malnutrition in the poorest countries slashes around 3 percent from annual economic growth.

In comparison, neighboring China has already achieved its target on malnutrition and under-five child mortality goals as its economic growth has been more broad-based, focusing on health, sanitation and small holder production.

While India has several schemes already running to battle malnutrition, the Indian government is now vaunting a multi-billion-dollar food subsidy program as a possible solution.

But the Food Security Bill, which guarantees cut-price rice and wheat to 63.5 percent of the population may be more a political gimmick, experts worry, than about providing nutritious food to those who need it most.

"The Food Security Bill is a very good development, but it is a food security bill, not a nutrition security bill," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the U.K.-based Institute of Development Studies.

For the children at Shivpuri's nutrition centre, government plans mean little unless they put enough of the right food in their stomachs.

"You see her arms? They are almost the width of my thumb," says Jharna, as she carried her limp, emaciated one-year-old grand-daughter, Sakshi, into the clinic. "She is too weak. She can't even sit by herself."

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