UN General Assembly
1986

To establish the world-wide co-operative structures that will enable us to master our common future, we need a comprehensive dialog between industrialized and developing countries. I therefore consider it urgently necessary that we should at last inject new life into the North-South dialog and that we should orient that dialog towards the major issues affecting the future, thereby making it a potent factor in international politics and economics. In 1975, which is already 11 years ago now, as we took the first steps towards a large-scale North-South dialog, our thinking was determined by the study drawn up by the Club of Rome on the limits to growth. Shortages of energy, raw materials and foodstuffs, limits on the tolerance of the environment, seemed to be the law that would determine the future of the world. But we are beginning to sense that sane thing completely different is taking places a new technological revolution, which is establishing new and wider horizons for growth. New forms of technology -space technology, information technology and gene technology - permit a new type of growth that conserves energy and raw materials and which protects, indeed heals, the environment. This departure from the industrial age into a new era is not by any means peculiar to the Western countries but is a world-wide phenomenon. The new forms of technology can also bring decisive benefits to the developing countries in particular.