Preventable Suffering

Even as you describe in your leading pages the powerful domestic and foreign policy plans envisioned by the President-elect, we are urging him to include as a centerpiece of a new U.S. foreign policy the elimination of the worst aspects of poverty by the year 2000.

A billion people in the world live today in absolute poverty, and every day 40,000 children die unnecessarily of preventable malnutrition and disease.

The goals of the World Summit for Children will be transformed into policies through visionary leadership. We hope that President Clinton will push to have appointed such a leader as James Grant to an unprecedented fourth term as executive director when his term expires in 1994.

THAIS S. LINDSTROM, Laguna Beach