Gulf between rich and poor is new apartheid, warns Mbeki

The needless deaths of 11 million children under five every year is an evil as great as the slave trade, the sending of children down mines, or – as President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa put it at the opening of this week's Earth Summit – apartheid.

They die of hunger and malnutrition, of diarrhoea from drinking dirty water and other preventable diseases, and from a vicious combination of them. Hundreds of millions more survive but will never achieve their full potential because these repeated assaults have stunted their bodies and minds for ever.

Every year, without exception, the world grows enough food to feed everyone adequately, yet 800 million people still go hungry. People have known how to provide clean water over long distances since Roman times, yet 1.1 billion still have to drink diluted sewage. And, though building latrines is hardly at the leading edge of technology, 2.4 billion people still have no adequate sanitation.

The world does not fail to meet these needs and save these children's lives because it is unable to do so. It fails because it does not want to.

"It is" in President Mbeki's words, "as though we are determined to regress to the most primitive condition of existence in the animal world, of the survival of the fittest."

The apartheid is visible not just in the vast international discrepancy between the rich and poor, where the wealthiest 1 per cent of the world's people receive as much total income as the poorest 57 per cent. President Mbeki's "islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty" are just as dramatic in Third World cities, where waterless slums gaze out on to irrigated golf courses and their inhabitants have to pay ten to 15 times as much for polluted water as the middle class do for their suburban piped supplies.

Apartheid eventually provoked violence, although South Africa escaped the war that toppled other unjust regimes. And the air at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which opened in Johannesburg yesterday, is thick with warnings that President Mbeki's "global apartheid" is also creating insecurity on a worldwide scale.

Jan Pronk, special envoy to the summit for the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said the industrialised world had become more determined to exclude the poor since 11 September. And he warned that if it continued to fail to address poverty "we will breed resentment, which may also breed violence". Klaus Töpfer, the executive director of the UN's environment program– me, said: "A society that is unable to live in the expect-ation of basic social services, employment and health cannot be sustainable."

Even Colin Powell, who will lead the American delegation, takes the point. Writing in Our Planet, the magazine of Dr Töpfer's organisation, he says that "sustainable development is a security imperative" and that "poverty, environmental degradation and despair" can "destablise countries, even entire regions".

Nitin Desai, the conference's secretary, said that international solidarity had helped to change South Africa, adding: "We need the same kind of solidarity to end global apartheid."

But with huge disagreements even over the conference's largely anodyne "plan of action", there is little prospect of that. Nor – with Mr Bush skulking in his Texan ranch, and Tony Blair planning only a fleeting visit – is there any sign of a global Nelson Mandela.