There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty.

This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice.

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship.

A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods, which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from piling up unmanageable foreign debts.

We now undertake that we cannot rest while millions of our people suffer the pain and indignity of poverty in all its forms.

Abject poverty is demeaning, is an assault on the dignity of those that suffer it. In the end it demeans us all. It makes the freedom of all of us less meaningful.