Our search for solutions must continue to seek answers to the fundamental issues of equity, fairness, justice, equality, and humanity. And how they are addressed will ultimately determine our kind of world. Most of the global conflicts during the past fifty years can be traced to economic and social causes. Poverty leads to the migration of populations. Drought and natural disasters kill and scatter families as refugees from once-secure homes.
Ethnic rivalries emanate from quarrels over scarce resources or land space.
Global security must be linked to the basic issues of food, shelter, health, and education-the cardinal indicators of social welfare that alone can secure all our human family against degradation, despair, and a purposeless life. The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty. Despite the many gains in our standard of living, poverty remains ubiquitous.