UN General Assembly
1990

The situation in the South is desperate. The World Bank, in its World Development Report 1990, reveals that in the 1980s there were over 1 billion people in developing countries classified as living in conditions of poverty, compared to 25 million in the developed countries. The World Bank further forecasts that the situation is unlikely to get better in the 1990s. In our age of the global village, it is inconceivable that nations can live in peace with each other in a world of such glaring disparities in the quality of life between the North and the South. The world does not have to wait for the eruption of a crisis of the nature we recently witnessed before addressing this problem. The question of equitable distribution of the benefits of development is not a case of being one's brother’s keeper but rather one of sharing a common destiny.