World leaders have finally come to realise that poverty is the ultimate systemic threat facing humanity. Just before he retired in February, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mr Michael Camdessus, warned that the widening gaps between rich and poor nations were potentially socially explosive. If the poor were left hopeless, he said, poverty would undermine societies through confrontation, violence and civil disorder.
Mr Camdessus's warning underlines the concern emerging among world leaders about the growing global gap between rich and poor.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been charting this gap in its annual human development reports. The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960, it said in its 1999 report.
While this has long been of concern to development experts, it is increasingly being acknowledged as a major security problem, for the world's poor and rich alike. As Prof Paul Rogers of Bradford University put it in a recently published book, "socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints will be core factors in determining levels of international insecurity in the next three decades".
The dominance of a free market system since the end of the Cold War has led to "the success of the few at the expense of the many", he writes. Even if the "few" number over a billion, those who are losing out are four to five times that number.
Socio-economic disparities are growing and extreme poverty is experienced by a substantial proportion of the world's population - between one and two billion - and shows little sign of decreasing; it may even be increasing as the world's population continues to grow by more than 80 million each year. Alongside these are an additional three billion people who are substantially marginalised as the world's elite surges ahead.
The problem is not confined to certain parts of the world. While in sub-Saharan Africa almost 300 million live on less than $1 (88 pence) a day, an increase from 217 million in 1987, the number of Russians living in poverty has increased from two million to 60 million in the past decade.
In East Asia - which, for a long time, was one of the few bright spots in the world where sustained economic growth was lifting many out of poverty - the financial crisis of 1997 has led to dramatic reversals. In Indonesia, the percentage of people living in poverty has risen from 11 per cent to more than 40 per cent in just a few years.
Meanwhile, at the heart of the developed world, inequality has been growing in virtually all countries, most markedly in those with the highest levels of economic growth - Ireland and the United States. In the UNDP index of poverty in the industrialised world, these two countries hold the unenviable record of having been in the top two places since the index was first published three years ago.
In Latin America, even the World Bank is admitting that the hopes it had in the early 1990s of reducing poverty and inequality have not been met. The UN's most recent estimate puts the number living in poverty at 220 million, an increase from 135 million in 1980 and 200 million in 1990.
The gap between these poor and the rich has continued to grow in most of the region's countries, from levels that were already the highest in the world.
The number of super-rich has also been growing. The world's richest 225 people have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 47 per cent of the world's population, while the three richest people have assets exceeding the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries. While most of these multi-billionaires are from industrialised countries, 43 are from Asia, 22 from Latin America and 11 from the Arab states
At the other end of the income scale, the number of super-rich has also been growing. The world's richest 225 people have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 47 per cent of the world's population, while the three richest people have assets exceeding the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries. While most of these multi-billionaires are from industrialised countries, 43 are from Asia, 22 from Latin America and 11 from the Arab states.
These are the stark realities that are leading security experts to switch their attention from the growth of sophisticated armaments to the growth of poverty and inequality as central elements of what they are calling the new security agenda. As Dr Andrew Hurrell of Oxford University recently said, "inequality should be seen much more directly as a central cause of the growth of social violence, ethnic conflict and civil wars".
Prof Rogers divides wars and civil conflicts over the past 50 years into what he calls epilogue or prologue wars. The former, among them Vietnam, Afghanistan or Angola, reflect the issues of the Cold War, such as decolonisation and the proxy wars of the then superpowers. The latter, however, indicate the sources of future conflict. Among these he numbers the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico - a revolt from the margins, as he calls it - and the 1991 Gulf War - fought over oil, a resource crucial to the West.
Among other such prologue wars could be numbered Sierra Leone, the fitful African war fought out on the territory of the Congo, Chechnya and Algeria, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and, indeed, the genocide in Rwanda. These involve multiple elements such as civil breakdown as groups fight over scarce resources, the emergence of identity (such as Islam or Hutu/Tutsi) as the basis of identifying who is one's enemy, the undermining of state power and control and the involvement of multiple groups, mercenaries and lawless gangs owing allegiance to no state or public authority.
Environmental destruction is exacerbating these sources of conflict as spreading deserts, deforestation and climate change make more parts of the globe scarcely habitable or prone to ever more frequent natural disasters. All of these are depleting the resources people have depended upon for a livelihood and, of course, they hit the poor far more heavily than the wealthy.
Even such a fundamental resource as water is, in places like the Middle East, the Nile region and India/Bangladesh, becoming a source of conflict as dams or irrigation schemes in one country can cause shortages for its neighbours. Driving the often unsustainable use of these resources is the pressure on poor people and poor countries to survive and develop.
Yet their needs were effectively neglected at the recent climate-change summit in The Hague, where the key issue became a standoff between the EU and the US about the extent to which the latter would be allowed offload its pollution on to developing countries through funding carbon sinks such as forests and plants to absorb carbon dioxide.
This neglect does not go unnoticed among the poor of the earth. The late Prof Susan Strange, in an article published posthumously last year, drew attention to the fact that "socio-economic inequality becomes intolerable if people believe it will get worse, not better".
The widespread sense that things are getting worse is perhaps the most worrying dimension of all. For example, the UNDP devoted its 1999 Human Development Report to showing how modern technologies such as the Internet, often held out as offering new opportunities for the poor, are exacerbating exclusion. The report states: "A new barrier has emerged, an invisible barrier that is like a World Wide Web, embracing the connected and silently - almost imperceptibly - excluding the rest."
Prof Caroline Thomas has drawn attention to the fact that, worldwide, 125 million children of primary-school age never attend school, while another 150 million drop out before they can read or write. This, she points out, constitutes more than one-quarter of the world's children, blighting their chances for a better life almost before they begin.
Inevitably, the effects of these divisions cannot be kept at bay by the developed countries. Already, there are some 30 to 40 million people around the world either displaced across state boundaries or within their own states. Only a small number of these reach the developed countries of North America or Western Europe but the prospects are there will be many more as poverty increases in eastern Europe and north Africa, and in central America.
In this situation, more stringent immigration controls by Western countries will be fighting to stem an ever-swelling tide. Instead, urgent attention needs to be focused on reversing the trend towards greater polarisation, exclusion and inequality. And, as evidence mounts that free market economic liberalisation since the 1980s has been driving the ever-widening rich-poor gap, so international relations experts are arguing for new forms of regulation and redistribution.
Among these would be a mandatory global code of conduct to make multinational corporations publicly accountable, stricter regulation of global financial flows and effective mechanisms to redistribute some of the world's vast wealth to the poor. One modest means of doing this would be the tax on international currency transactions proposed by Nobel economics prize winner James Tobin, who estimated that a 0.5 per cent tax would raise more than$1.5 trillion annually to be spent on social need.
All of this would require more robust global institutions and decisive political will among the world's richest states to allow such institutions develop effective regulatory and redistributive functions.
There are few signs that, left to themselves, our political leaders are capable of anything more than placatory rhetoric.
This is why the emergence of more activist global civil society movements, protesting over the past year on the streets of Seattle against the World Trade Organisation and in Prague against the IMF and World Bank, is a sign of hope. Issues of global inequality and the role of global institutions in promoting agendas favourable to corporate capital rather than to the needs of the poor are becoming the stuff of real political battles. History teaches us that this is the only way to effect decisive economic and social change.
Dr Peadar Kirby lectures on the MA in International Relations in Dublin City University. His study of growth with inequality in Ireland's development is to be published by Macmillan/Palgrave next year and he is writing a book on the prospects for Latin America in the new global order.