Full Text Of Kofi Annan's Farewell Address

[Jcrowley]

And I believe we have a responsibility not only to our contemporaries but also to future generations — a responsibility to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us, and without which none of us can survive. And that means we must do much more, and urgently, to prevent or slow down climate change. Every day that we do nothing, or too little, imposes higher costs on our children, and our children's children.

My second lesson is that we are not only all responsible for each other's security. We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other's welfare. Global solidarity is both necessary and possible.

• It is necessary because, without a measure of solidarity — without some sense of shared values and shared destiny — no society can be truly stable, and no one's prosperity truly secure. That applies to national societies — as all the great industrial democracies learned in the 20th century — but it also applies to the increasingly integrated global market economy we live in today. It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalization while billions of their fellow human beings are left in abject poverty, or even thrown into it. We have to give at least a chance to share in our prosperity to our fellow citizens, not only within each nation but in the global community.

• That is why, five years ago, the UN Millennium Summit adopted a set of goals — the "Millennium Development Goals" — to be reached by 2015: goals such as halving the proportion of people in the world who don't have clean water to drink; making sure all girls, as well as boys, receive at least primary education; slashing infant and maternal mortality; and stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15871.htm

[goclark]

1. Thanks so much