buying $11 billion worth of ice cream while $9 billion would have
sufficed to provide water and sanitation for all. And it was estimated
that the cost of basic health and education worldwide would have
been $13 billion, in comparison with the $17 billion that Europeans
and Americans paid out for pet food.^68
Because of this hostile economic environment, Third World popu-
lations continue to live in conditions of hardship that most people in
the developed countries would find intolerable. In a time when global
wealth has reached unheard of levels and agricultural production is
enough to meet the needs of everyone on earth, 800 million individ-
uals go hungry.^69 Each year 10 million children die of curable diseases
as commonplace as diarrhea. A woman is 100 times more likely to die
during pregnancy or childbirth in Sub-Saharan Africa than in a
developed country.^70 Among the infectious diseases ravaging the
South, AIDS is no doubt the one that has attracted the most media
attention because it also affects the North. It is often forgotten that
95 percent of HIV cases – that is, more than 40 million individuals –
are located in the developing world. The most dramatic consequence
of the AIDS epidemic is to have reduced life expectancy in some thirty
countries; in certain states, such as Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland,
and Zimbabwe, life expectancy has been reduced by over twenty
years.^71 Thus, the division between rich and poor is literally a matter
of life and death, and this situation will most likely persist so long as a
mere 10 percent of medical research resources are devoted to prob-
lems affecting 90 percent of the world’s population.^72
International inequalities are also legion in the sphere of labor.
For one thing, capital mobility and the high rates of unemployment
prevalent in the Third World restrict the bargaining power of emplo-
yees of companies that are integrated in the global production system.^73
Yet most workers in the South do not even enjoy the privilege of
negotiating their labor conditions, since they are employed within the
(^68) UNDP,Human Development Report 1998: Consumption for Human
69 Development, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 37.
UNDP, “Millennium Development Goals: A Status Report,” New York,
70 UNDP, 2003 (http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/).
UNDP,Human Development Report 2003, p. 97.
(^71) Ibid., p. 43. (^72) Ibid., p. 158.
(^73) World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization,A Fair
Globalization, p. 46, paragraph 210.
76 Left and Right in Global Politics