The price of luxury

Sunday 11.10pm

In this three part series, journalist Sean Langan travels from one end of Latin America to the other to discover what impact globalisation has had on the people who live there.

Sean begins his journey in Argentina, arriving just after the country was declared bankrupt by the international community.

He sees the full impact of the IMF-demanded cuts in social spending: doctors work without pay, children play Russian roulette, and families search for food on rubbish tips. These are the losers in globalisation - the poor subsisting on less than $2 a day.

In the second programme, Sean sees what happens to poor countries when they oppose globalisation. He travels to Bolivia and meets the people who can't afford to buy water from the French company who own the supply.

In Venezuela, he meets President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who had just survived a coup supported by America, and witnesses rioting in the slums of Caracas.

In the third programme, Sean meets the people who pay the price for our cheap products: the workers on banana plantations in Honduras, the women who make clothes while living in slums, and the children who pick coffee in Guatemala.

The series ends beside the Rio Grande, where a 16-year-old girl, nine months into her pregnancy, plans to cross illegally into America by wading through freezing water. 

Are the benefits from globalisation worth the price of such poverty?