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.

“If we are not able to reverse these trends through specific actions, we will not be able to resolve any of the other problems affecting the peoples of the world.”

The Mexican president’s plan would see a fund created for a “world plan for fraternity and wellbeing” that would lift 750 million people — those subsisting on less than $2 (£1.48) a day — out of poverty and “guarantee their right to a decent life.”

It would take an annual contribution of 4 per cent of the incomes of the 1,000 richest people on the planet, the same percentage from the 1,000 largest private corporations, selected according to their market value, and 0.2 per cent of the GDP of the countries in the G20.

“Nothing really substantial has been done to benefit the poor in the history of this organisation,” Mr Lopez Obrador charged.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric responded that the global poverty rate had falled from 36 per cent in 1990 to 8.4 per cent in 2019.