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Although the Third World population is literally exploding—there are 200,000 new mouths to feed every day—the land available for growing food is diminishing. In many parts of the developing world, valuable farm acreage has been abandoned because of urban sprawl, soil erosion and desert encroachment. As life in the countryside becomes too wretched to endure, millions of peasants abandon their farms and head for the slums of the developing world's cities, vainly seeking jobs that do not exist. Whether they are called favelas, ranches, bustees, barriadas or bidonvilles, there is a tragic sameness about these hovels where millions live and die: the fragile shacks made of cardboard or rusting corrugated sheet metal, the famished children's distended bellies, the inescapable stench of human beings packed tightly together without ready access to water or toilets (see box page 38).
Widespread poverty is a problem that afflicts all underdeveloped countries. Nonetheless, they differ among themselves so greatly in their economic promise that it makes more sense these days to divide the globe into five worlds instead of three:
THE FIRST WORLD includes the advanced industrial nations of Europe, North America and Asia that accept a more or less capitalist, market-oriented economy. The U.S., Canada, Japan, most of the nations of Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia clearly qualify. South Africa, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Argentina are borderline cases.
THE SECOND WORLD includes the 1.3 billion people of the world's centrally planned, Communist-run nations, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which has a somewhat mixed economy.
THE THIRD WORLD, with 620 million inhabitants, is made up of a large body of still poor states that need time and technology, rather than massive foreign aid, to build modern, developed economies. The nations in this category include the revenue-rich members of OPEC (Organization of Oil Exporting Countries), as well as states whose development may be guaranteed by other key natural resources: Zaire and Zambia (copper), Morocco (phosphates), Malaysia (tin, rubber and timber). Into this group also fall nations like Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil, which are developed enough to attract foreign investment and borrow on commercial terms.
THE FOURTH WORLD contains the LDCs that have some raw materials, some modern economic infrastructure and some trained technocrats and administrators and thus could eventually achieve self-sustaining economic growth. But unlike Third World countries, they need significant financial help and special treatment by the industrial powers to spur exports of their goods and imports of technology. This group, with a population of 930 million, includes Peru, the Dominican Republic, Liberia, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and Guinea-Bissau.
THE FIFTH WORLD countries, comprising 175 million inhabitants, are the globe's true basket cases, perhaps doomed to remain on a