For example, the 2016 UNICEF report on the situation of children in the world (UNICEF, 2016a: 9–11) reveals that the gap between the extent of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and wealthy countries has hardly diminished for a quarter of a century. Children born in sub-Saharan Africa are 12 times more likely to die before their 5th birthday than children in wealthy countries. For example, a child who is born today in Sierra Leone is 30 times more likely to die before they are five years old than a child in Great Britain. The proportion of children who die shortly after birth is larger. Almost half of the children die because of infectious diseases, pulmonary infections, diarrhoea, malaria, meningitis, tetanus, maize, blood poisoning or AIDS, all of which would be avoidable with better living conditions and better medication. According to the UNICEF report, the risk of dying from these diseases is particularly high among the most disadvantaged. In rural regions, life expectancy is particularly affected by the lack of access to land, credit and property rights. In cities, people living in informal or ‘illegal’ settlements and slums are particularly vulnerable to dangerous diseases due to overpopulation, lack of sanitation, high transport costs and discrimination practices. Climate change brings additional risks. Widespread water deficiency forces people to access unclean water, which leads to illnesses such as cholera and fatal diarrheal diseases. Climate change also has an impact on the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and is associated with growing food insecurity, malnutrition and air pollution, which are particularly detrimental to the life expectancy and development of children.7
In another report, UNICEF (2016b) draws attention to the fact that 300 million children live in areas where air pollution is at least six times higher than internationally agreed limits. According to this report, 2 billion children are living in areas where fine dust pollution exceeds the annual limit of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (10 μg/m³) set by the World Health Organization (WHO). Up to 88 per cent of all deaths caused by outdoor air pollution and over 99 per cent of all deaths caused by indoor air pollution occur in low- or middle-income countries. Asia is currently the worst continent for air pollution, while values in Africa are on the rise, due to intensified industrialization, urbanization and traffic. People in urban areas, where poverty is particularly high, are particularly vulnerable to air pollution. Poor families also have fewer opportunities to protect themselves from air pollution by using fans, filters or air-conditioning systems, which, however, would be associated with increased energy consumption.8
The high rate of child mortality highlighted in the UNICEF report on the situation of children in the world (UNICEF, 2016a) also logically coincides with poverty, to which people in the Southern world regions are condemned. It is true that the proportion of people living in absolute or extreme poverty has declined worldwide in the past two decades, but the absolute number of the poor and the gap between living conditions in poor and prosperous regions of the world has increased. The measurement of poverty is a complicated undertaking and must take into account other aspects, apart from income, that are equally important for quality of life, such as living conditions, educational opportunities, access to drinking water, sanitary conditions, and so on. But due to the fact that life, as result of capitalist production, today is largely monetarized in all societies, disposable income is particularly important.
The World Bank assumes that people who have less than US$1.90 a day to live on are considered extremely poor. According to UNICEF (2016a: 72), nearly 900 million people were living in extreme poverty in 2012, almost half of whom were children under the age of 18. The UNICEF report rightly points out that even children above the poverty definition of the World Bank are often severely restricted in their lives and have lower life expectancy. Let us consider, for example, a family that does not have access to housing, food, drinking water, sanitation, education, health services or information. Children in such a home are also affected, and even more so, by poverty. Taking into account these non-monetary aspects, UNICEF estimates that in 2015, 1.6 billion people lived in ‘multidimensional poverty’. Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the results of research are alarming. Here, in 30 countries from which data was available, 247 out of 368 million children under the age of 18 had met at least two out of five poverty criteria that put their survival and development at risk (see Plavgo and de Milliano, 2014). Another study found for the years 2008 and 2009 that the life expectancy of 81 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean was limited by at least one poverty indicator (see ECLAC-UNICEF, 2010; UNICEF, 2016a: 78).
In the UNICEF reports, the reasons why high poverty, air pollution and child mortality are mainly affecting the people of the Global South are not or only vaguely named. It is clearer in other UN reports, in which not only poverty itself is depicted, but also the increase in worldwide material inequality over longer periods of time. For example, a United Nations Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999: 3) shows that:
… 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. In the nineteenth century, too, inequality grew rapidly during the last three decades, in an era of rapid global integration: the income gap between the top and bottom countries increased from 3 to 1 in 1820 to 7 to 1 in 1870 and 11 to 1 in 1913. By the late 1990s the fifth of the world’s people living in the highest-income countries had: 86% of world GDP – the bottom fifth just 1%.
In other investigations on the worldwide distribution of income and wealth (for example, Milanović, 2012; Piketty, 2014), it has been shown that material inequalities in the global context have long been extremely high and further growth is to be expected if those inequalities are not specifically politically counteracted.
The French economist Thomas Piketty (2014: 463) points out that wealth inequality is growing not only between states and regions, but is also reflected in an increasing privatization of assets, which he calls the ‘oligarchic type of divergence’. That is a process in which all countries ‘come to be owned more and more by the planet’s billionaires and multimillionaires’ (Piketty, 2014: 463) and therefore would not be available to the states, for example, for infrastructure, social or educational programmes. While assets are concentrated among a small minority of the super-rich, less than 5 per cent of the world’s total assets are available to the poorest half of the world’s population. According to a report published by Oxfam (2017), which is based on data from the Swiss bank Crédit Suisse, the richest 1 per cent of the world’s population has as many assets as the rest of the world combined. In 2015, the 62 richest people on earth had as much as the poorer half of humanity – about 3.6 billion people. While the wealth of the rich grew by 44 per cent over the five years to 2015, the wealth of the poorest half fell by 41 per cent. The discrepancy between rich and poor has never been so great.
Growing social inequality reflects the unequal distribution of power between the Global North and the Global South, which arose in the colonial era, and which now exists in covert institutional forms. It no longer expresses itself openly in colonial expansion, conquest and dominance, but