Twelve years later, virtually every commitment made at Paris has been broken. The poorest countries are worse off than in 1990; the assertion that ‘liberalisation’ and ‘trickle down economics’ ‘create wealth’ is a mockery. The number of poor countries has actually increased, with almost half their people subsisting on less than a dollar a day. Their life expectancy has deteriorated to twenty-five years shorter than that of people in developed countries; in Afghanistan, few survive beyond their forties.
