The Problem Is Africa
Alan Wood in the Australian suggests we Pity poor McDonald-less Africa:

HOW many McDonald's are there in Africa? The Big Mac's US website lists 170, mostly in South Africa and Egypt, with a few in Morocco. Not many for a continent of nearly 800 million people. Australia, with a population of a little less than 20 million, has 712 McDonald's and counting.

There is a serious point to this comparison. McDonald's has become a potent symbol of what is wrong with globalisation for groups such as Greenpeace and the anti-globalisation non-government organisations. It represents US cultural and economic imperialism, an evil US multinational corporation.

On this logic, Africa is the lucky continent and Australia the unlucky one. Who believes that? The truth is the number of McDonald's outlets is a pretty good global index of economic prosperity and cultural diversity. Australia has hardly become a culinary monoculture because of the spread of the Golden Arches.

Although there are 712 McDonald's, there are more than 4000 Chinese restaurants, more than 2000 other Asian restaurants, more than 2500 Italian restaurants and 10,600 that style themselves as modern Australian.

...

The conference volume confirms that the story of the past three decades has been the Africanisation of world poverty. This is summed up in the introduction to the conference papers by David Gruen of the RBA and Terry O'Brien of Treasury. Although there are difficulties in getting reliable figures, it appears there has been a huge fall in the number of people outside Africa living in extreme poverty (an income of less than $US1 ? $1.82 _ per day). Conservatively, there has been a net fall of more than 200 million since 1970, despite an increase in the world's population of about 1.6 billion. But during the same time there has been a rise of about 175 million in those living in extreme poverty in Africa. In 1960 Africa was home to only about one in 10 of the world's extremely poor, but two in three of them by 1998.

This is not the outcome of globalisation. On the contrary, Africa's problems stem in large part from its inability to integrate into the world economy, unlike Asia and India, where the numbers living in extreme poverty have plunged and per capita incomes have soared.

Treasury put it bluntly in a paper last year: "It is one of the ironies of the [past] few years that globalisation's critics attribute to it economic problems that in fact arise from ethnic and religious fragmentation, civil wars, corruption and the absence of modern institutions and social trust." It was talking about Africa.

This isn't new news (1, 2), but the professional foreign aid pimps and professional "advocates" don't want it bandied about. They want more useless foreign aid to perpetuate their own petty rackets. Meanwhile the Mercedes dealers in Africa wax fatter off the corrupt dictators and their hangers-on while the people starve.