mitment in international capitals to launch a new round. Marginalization rather than globalization poses the greatest threat to the economies of impoverished countries. In an attempt to pave the way for a fresh round of trade liberalization talks, heads of the WTO will tell a EU ministers that opening new markets is crucial to hitting targets set by the UN for reducing poverty by the year 2015. Debt relief alone will be insufficient to put the poorest countries on the road to sustained prosperity and that further trade liberalization will help boost export growth and overall economic performance.
             In order to make progress in reducing extreme poverty, the poorest countries need to be drawn into the global economy and increase their access to modern knowledge and technology. Making the trading system work for the poor would be essential to the health of the world economy. We have a profound structural problem in the world economy and it will continue well into the future as long as we have so many people living in poverty.
             The biggest obstacle to rapid economic development in Africa has not been the lack of physical resources or shortage of money, but the poverty of ideas. African societies lack an outlook on the contemporary world economy that situate them in the dynamics of development. They are floating aimlessly, still anchored to the 19th century.
             The claim that globalization has widened the gap between rich and poor nations assume that without integration, today's poor nations would have been materially better off. There is no evidence to support this. On the contrary, societies that have had the least contact with the outside world are also the least materially developed. It would be absurd to argue with respect to any African society that if, at independence, it had severed all links with the developed world and pursued an insular existence, it would have progressed further than it has with unification...