"The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the ‘Third World,’ to distinguish them from the ‘First World’ of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct ‘Second World’ of communist states. Third World poverty, called ‘underdevelopment,’ is treated by most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people underproductive.

In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went through so much trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor – and it is because of the pillage they have endured.

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago and continues to this day. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices, then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, ivory, ebony, and later on oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminium, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is the most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor."

- Michael Parenti, Against Empire