UN General Assembly
1990

Promoting peace and economic development is still the challenge we face. We meet in the shadow of the Gulf crisis with its attendant economic uncertainties caused by the heavy increases in fuel prices. We meet as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reports that over a billion of our fellow human beings live in absolute poverty, that nearly 900 million adults are unable to read and write and that 40,000 children who could be saved die every day in our world because of underdevelopment and poverty. In many countries in Africa and Latin America the 1980s have witnessed stagnation, or even reversal, in human achievements. With the decline in commodity prices and the continuing high prices for manufactured goods and oil, the inevitable result is the worsening unequal exchange affecting most of the third world.