ABSTRACT
Poverty, war, famine, revolution, swollen urban slums, military coups, rural landlessness and hunger: when people think about the Third World, or ‘the South’ as it has more recently been called, it is often that images of these things come to mind. They are familiar items today on television screens and in newspaper headlines in the industrial societies of Europe and North America, or ‘the North’. The faces and distended bellies of starving children, pictures of terrified refugees clutching small bundles of possessions, and the cruel clatter of gunfire can be seen and heard in our media, side by side with advertisements for sunny holidays, new cars or washing machines, and a great variety of food and drink. These problems are associated with strange (and often changing) names of distant places in Asia (like Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia; Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, and before that part of India); in Africa (like Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia; Uganda, Upper Volta and Lesotho); and in Latin America and the Caribbean (like El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile and Haiti).
