UN General Assembly
1979

94. The reality of this poverty can be seen on all the street corners of the proletarian nations and the figures which sum up this tragic condition of the majority of mankind are so huge that they even lose all meaning. Some of these figures are really discouraging: according to the World Bank, 800 million people in the world live beneath what is termed the "line of absolute poverty"; more than 800 million human beings are illiterate; 400 million suffer from serious diseases; 500 million, or more than three quarters, suffer from chronic or permanent malnutrition; and 50 million—I repeat, 50 million— die of hunger each year, while elsewhere, in countries which get much of their riches from third- world resources, people sometimes die from overeating. 95. These statistics are global and impersonal. Their very size helps to make them abstract, removing any elementary emotional content.