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General Assembly-Twenty-ninth Session-Plenary Meetings

nate, since your personal wisdom and experience

will guide our deliberations, and you represent a country which in both the political and the economic spheres has a record of initiative and leadership. 26. My delegation wishes, too, to pay a tribute to your predecessor, Mr. Benites of Ecuador, who guided the twenty-eighth session and the sixth special session of the General Assembly with brilliance and juridical sagacity. 27. It is my privilege to be the first after the address of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh to welcome Bangladesh to the United Nations. The Prime Minister's moving address has emphasized to us the urgent and terrible problems which face many parts of the world-none more so than his stricken country. 28. We particularly welcome Guinea-Bissau as a new Member State. Its gallant struggle' for freedom has been vindicated and its presence here today reflects the rebirth of democracy in Portugal, whose previous regime's colonial policy I described at the previous session of this Assembly [2/25th meeting] as doing an injustice to the Portuguese people, their traditions and their past contributions to human

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knowledge and culture. We hope soon to greet the newly emerging independent States of Mozambique and Angola. My delegation wishes to pay a special tribute to the inspiring and heart-warming address delivered here on Monday [2239th meeting] by the Foreign Minister of Portugal and to offer to his country our congratulations and most whole-hearted support in the new phase of its history which is now opening. 29. To Grenada, the Isle of Spice, we also give

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our warm felicitations. As the Prime Minister, Mr. Gairy, has said [2233rd meeting], the presence

here of Grenada is an expression of faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of man which underscores the principle of self-deterrnination.

30. The world that we have inherited from the past has had its own equilibrium, Supply and demand have been kept more or less in balance by the price mechanism; the spheres of influence of the great

on a global scale, as well as the problem of creating a new world political equilibrium that will reflect the rights of peoples vis-a-vis each other-a new equilibrium that will replace a pattern of interna_ tional relations hips that owes all too much to injustices inherited from history. . 33. It is only in the past decade that rich and poor nations alike have for the first time come to a full realization of how unjust is the present distribution

of the world's resources and how inequitable is the sharing of power between the world's peoples. This belated realization brings with it, naturally, a desire to set things right, to create a true equilibrium

in place of that false equilibrium that has hitherto existed between the nations of the world. 34. That radical changes in the relationships between rich and poor nations and in the distribution

of the world's resources are urgently needed is now common ground among all but the most selfish and most reactionary. A new sense of mutual commit. ment between nations and peoples has been a feature of the past decade in world affairs and has begun to influence the attitudes of nations and their politicalleaders towards each other. 35. The problem of putting right a world structure which is so evidently and pervasively wrong is not, however, going to be easy to solve; on the contrary,

it seems likely to prove frustratingly intractable. For, unjust though the economic and political equilibrium that has hitherto existed in the world may be, it is an equilibrium, and a delicately balanced one at that. We have seen on a number of occasions

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36. In the economic sphere also we are learning at this time how sensitive is the equilibrium that has hitherto existed among different groups of nations in the world-the United States, the countries of Western Europe and other industrialized countries, the State-trading countries, the oil-producing countries, the producers of other raw materials and those

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countries which are not endowed with natural re-

sources. For the past 12 months the world economic system has been reverberating with the shock-effects of a sudden readjustment in the terms of trade between the oil-producing countries and the rest of the world, and to a lesser extent between other raW material producers and the rest of the world.

31, The fact that such a balance has existed throughout the past generation has obscured for many the fact that the relationships which have found themselves more or less in equilibrium during this period

37. So finely balanced are the economic and social structures that have grown up through the centuries, and so accustomed have most peoples, especially in the developed world, become in recent decades

are themselves in many instances inherently unjust

to a regular annual increase in their real incomes, that

and therefore unstable. The equilibrium has in fact in many respects been a false one, reflecting an inherited balance of forces that has no objective justification other than the fact that it has secured a certain short-term stability in world affairs.

the impact of a sudden adjustment in real incomes of even 5 or 6 per cent has proved dangerously disruptive and threatens the economic and perhaps even the political stability of some countries.

32, We in this generation now face the consequences of the understandable, but perhaps near-fatal, neglect by those who have gone before us of the fundamental problems involved in this false equilibrium. We face the problem of setting right imbalances between and within nations and social and economic injustices

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in recent decades how in the sphere of power politics even a marginal shift in the political balance between the super-Powers can endanger world peace.

full generation; and even within particular regions of the world where local conflict situations have existed, a political balance has been maintained, disrupted only infrequently by the outbreak of conflicts, which have in each case been successfully localized.

Powers have remained more or less stable over a

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38. Moreover, the chain effects of any disruption of this balance are so immensely dangerous to the economy of the whole world and all its peoples, poor as well as rich, that all who are concerned with securing a more equitable distribution of wealth and power throughout the world have been forced by these recent events to consider carefully the manner

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