UN General Assembly
1990

While the industrialized countries have been enjoying uninterrupted growth for eight years, the Majority of the developing countries have been stagnating or even falling back. Analysts agree that extreme poverty is rampant among 4 billion people at the same time as 800 million people are bathing in abundance. Poverty, a source· of tension within our societies and beyond our frontiers, is assailing the developing countries, with its attendant woes of malnutrition, sickness and illiteracy, but it does not spare the industrialised world, which have its own social disparities. The decade of the 1980s, now coming to an end, is leaving the developing world & legacy of more than 1 billion people living in absolute poverty, and our African continent remains its favourite target. Indeed, conditions in Africa are such that in years to come we may see there a dangerously explosive situation, both socially and politically, as was recently emphasised by an eminent person from the Commission of European Communities. The international community cannot remain indifferent to that situation. An urgent response must be provided.