UN General Assembly
1976

195. It is now an accepted truism that international society, like any national society, cannot be sustained indefinitely in conditions where the world is divided between small islands of riches and affluence, and vast oceans of human poverty. The earlier optimism, of the 1950s and 1960s, when hopes hinged upon a gradual but imperative bridging of the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots," is gone. The original gap seems to be widening today rather than narrowing and at an accelerated rate which only phenomenal technological breakthroughs are making possible. There is a growing realization that national efforts at economic and social betterment are wholly inadequate to remedy a situation whose seriousness is compounded as we enter the final quarter of this twentieth century. It was in recognition of that lamentable fact that the General Assembly, meeting in its sixth special session in 1974, issued a call for a new international economic order and later, at its regular session, adopted a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. Since then the forums of debate have proliferated and multiplied, which has been only natural in view of the complexities and wide-ranging dimensions of the issues involved.