Globalisation has been a double-edged sword. To those able and willing to seize the opportunities and manage globalisation on their own terms, it has provided the basis of unprecedented growth.

China and India, with a total of 2.4 billion people, have for more than a quarter of a century been growing at unprecedented rates, with hundreds of millions of people moving out of poverty. They have taken advantage of globalisation of knowledge and globalisation of markets.

China and India had the education, the technology and the resources to take advantage of the new technology, to close the gap between them and the advanced industrial countries.

But elsewhere, matters have not worked out so well. There is growing disparity between the richest and the poorest countries, as well as growing inequalities within most countries around the world, and globalisation, as it is managed, has played an important role in both of these disturbing trends.

The number of people in poverty in Africa has doubled in the past two decades and globalisation has contributed to these problems. Africa was left by its colonial legacy with neither the resources nor the education, for instance, to take advantage of the new technologies that make such a difference in India and China.

But making matters worse is the fact that the last trade agreement, the Uruguay Round, signed in Marrakesh in the spring of 1994, was so unfair that the poorest countries of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa as a region, were actually made poorer. The North insisted that the South remove its trade barriers, open up its markets to the goods produced in the North and eliminate its subsidies, but the North did not fully reciprocate.

Of particular concern is agriculture. Seventy per cent of the people in the developing world depend directly, or indirectly, on agriculture. The massive subsidies in the North serve to depress the incomes of those in the South and increase the poverty. For example, the US subsidises cotton to the tune of $3 billion (£1.5 billion) to $4 billion a year. Twenty-five thousand very rich cotton farmers divide that money, most of it going to about 5,000 of these farmers. But the consequence is that the US, which would not be exporting cotton at all, has become the world’s largest exporter and, as it exports more, global prices of cotton fall and ten million people in sub-Saharan Africa suffer as a result.

But it’s not only the US; Europe also is to blame. The average cow in Europe receives a subsidy of, by some estimates, more than $2 a day — a number that has considerable resonance because $2 a day is the World Bank’s definition of poverty. About 40 per cent of those in the developing world live on less than $2 a day. So, it is better to be a cow in Europe than to be an average person in the developing world.