In Structural and Terminal Imbalance?

• Author: Cilliers, Jakkie
• Position: Brief Article

WITHOUT CHANGE IN CHARACTER AND FOCUS, IT WILL BECOME INCREASINGLY IRRELEVANT

The most serious challenge that the United Nations will have to deal with during the first decades of the twenty-first century is the increased imbalance between the rich and poor, between globalization and marginalization. Already, the 1999 Human Development Report points to the fact that the income gap between the fifth of the world's population living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest had deteriorated, from 60 to 1 in 1990 to 74 to 1 in 1997. Not only is the rate of disparity accelerating, but so too is the relationship between those at the top and the bottom of the Human Development Index. A global system within which the assets of the three richest people in the world are more than the combined gross national product of all least developed countries and their 600 million people is in structural and possibly terminal imbalance.

Recent years have shown increasing concentrations of income, resources and wealth between a smaller percentage of people, corporations and countries, largely within the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the rest. Global trade imbalances reinforce the marginalization and vulnerability of a region such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which is not only dependent upon a very small range of basic export commodities, but also more vulnerable to global market turbulence.

In this region, exports constitute nearly 30 per cent of gross domestic product, compared to only 19 per cent for the OECD. Yet, these countries, the United Nations Development Programme points out, hang on the vagaries of global markets, with the prices of primary commodities having fallen to their lowest levels in a century and a half.

As a result, wealth and opportunity, indeed the benefits of globalization, driven by market expansion, accrue to a handful of countries and an increasingly smaller portion of the global population. The United Nations was established to deal with interstate conflict--a task made even more urgent with the advent of nuclear weapons. Structurally, it still reflects the dominant power balance within the international system at the end of the Second World War. At that time, the vast number of the present members of the United Nations were either under colonial or other type of domination, and population pressure and interdependence had not made disparity a global concern. Populations...