UN General Assembly
1994

Famine Relief (Oxfam), have accused them of undermining the relief of poverty, of making people poorer and giving short-term economic aims, such as the reduction of inflation, higher priority than the reduction of poverty. Only a few would today deny the need for drastic reform or the dismantling of State bureaucracies in favour of private investment and more open economies, but the structural adjustment which this entails should do more than pay lip-service to the challenges of providing better education and health facilities in developing countries. The multilateral financial institutions, and the major Powers which control them, must become less ideologically inflexible and more alert to the deleterious effect of some of their policies on poor States. It is a startlingly telling measure of the wide divergence of views between developed and developing countries that this week developing countries rejected out of hand a proposal by major Powers in the IMF on ways to increase world monetary reserves. There is an urgent need for urgent, meaningful and sincere dialogue between representatives of the rich and