UN General Assembly
1999

productive populations will be killed by this pandemic in the next few years. What development and progress are we talking about, then, if we will have no human resource to implement them? The continued deterioration of economic conditions in Africa poses a challenge to all of us, especially as all statistics show that the world’s poor continue to wallow in abject poverty with only a dim hope of improvement in their living standards. One of the main requirements of our current session of the General Assembly is therefore to select for implementation those measures that will enable developing countries to grow out of poverty in a sustainable environment. My delegation continues to be concerned about the deterioration of official development assistance, even though we note with gratitude the decision by three industrialized countries to increase their gross national product allocation to aid, and the steadfastness of Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, which are providing more than 0.7 per cent of their gross national product. Official development assistance resources need to be increased to levels which, combined