Free Republic

Part of the solution to the complex problem of African poverty rests on Western economies dropping trade barriers on agricultural products from the Third World. Mark Micallef looks at the World Trade Organisation's promise of a global free trade pact against the background of a growing influx of economic refugees. More people will have died from extreme poverty during this week than were killed by the South-East Asian Tsunami last December. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that a harrowing 30,000 people die from extreme poverty each day. Some 1.2 billion people - one in every five people on Earth...

The events of September 11, 2001 have led, among many other things, to the revival of an old debate about the relationship between poverty and political extremism. To get at the root of apocalyptic terrorism, many new initiatives to reduce global poverty have been proposed. British International Development Secretary Clare Short advocates a massive international effort to stop poor countries from becoming breeding grounds for terrorism: "The conditions which bred their bitterness and hatred", she has said, "are linked to poverty and injustice." Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has called for a fifty-year Marshall Plan that would disperse...