The two of us met in my kitchen to talk about Sebastiao Salgado's latest book, Migrations. He travelled for six years, visiting 43 countries. Everywhere he went he found people on the move, looking for somewhere, some way, to earn their living and feed their children. During those six years, Salgado, the economist who became a photographer, took pictures of the face of globalisation.
Globalisation means many things.
At one level, it talks of trade, which since the 16th century has exchanged goods and now, increasingly, ideas and information across the globe. But globalisation is also a view of the world - it is an opinion about man and why men are on the world. One in five of all the people on the globe benefits from this system. Four in five suffer in differring degrees from the new unnecessary poverty. Part of the fanaticism of the economic system that we now call globalisation, part of its bigotry, is that it pretends that no alternative is possible.