MEXICAN President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has outlined an ambitious global poverty alleviation programme at the United Nations, warning that inequality has reached such levels that the world is sliding from “civilisation to barbarity.”

Mr Lopez Obrador said that the Covid pandemic had highlighted the gulf in power and wealth between the richest and the rest. Of all vaccination doses so far delivered, he pointed out, just 6 per cent had been provided to the World Health Organisation’s Covax distribution programme — the other 94 per cent having been sold by pharmaceutical companies.

“The spirit of co-operation is losing ground to the desire for profit and this is leading us to slide from civilisation into barbarity,” he said.