UN General Assembly
1999

community, my country is also participating in peacekeeping operations, in particular in the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is distressing to note that the world economy is still dominated and controlled by a minority of States that manipulate its rules and the way it operates in their own interests and to the detriment of the interests of the great majority — the countries that make up the South. With regard to social development, poverty has continued to increase in developing countries, where about 1.5 billion people — one quarter of the world's population — are living on less than $1 per capita per day. Food security is far from guaranteed in those countries, while in the affluent countries food is destroyed on a huge scale in order to stabilize prices. The scarcity of drinking water supplies and medical services condemns a third of humanity to a life expectancy of no more than 40 years. Illiteracy greatly limits the access of the poorest to knowledge and,