UN General Assembly
1974

49. The sixth special session of the General Assembly, convened, as I said earlier, upon the initiative of the great leader of Algeria, President Boumediene, made it possible as regards raw materials and development to discern a new policy and to commit the international community to changing the asymmetrical features of international economic relations today. It is true that we cannot expect everything to change immediately, but these rearguard actions cannot make any less valid the lessons learned by the international community from the sixth special session, during which the third world, seeing its very survival threatened, was able to become fully aware of the fact that the fundamental reasons for its backwardness were not something it was predestined to put up with, but, rather, that its underdevelopment was organized and maintained by international imperialism which uses the poverty of the third world as a method of increasing its progress and wealth. This special session was an opportunity for the third world countries to reject the logic of the system of the division of labor which forced poor nations to supply raw materials at low prices, while the prices for capital goods were maintained at high levels.