Human development: a question of security. (includes related articles)

"We need another profound transition in thinking--from nuclear security to human security". In these terms the Human Development Report 1994, published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), proposes a new approach to world affairs in which security and territorial integrity are no longer regarded as synonymous, and people rather than national borders have to be protected. It is true that the nuclear threat continues to exist, but the risk of a global catastrophe is a thing of the past. By contrast, unemployment, famine, disease, the deterioration of the environment and rising crime rates are widespread problems against which weapons are of no avail.

Security is based on development, not weapons

Over the past twenty years, the number of jobs created in the industrial countries has increased at only half the rate of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 1993, more than 35 million people were seeking work, a high proportion of them women. Young people continue to be haunted by the spectre of unemployment, which is often bound up with their ethnic origins. In the developing countries, more than 10 per cent of the active population are jobless. Insecurity of employment goes hand-in-hand with insecurity of incomes, which are eroded by inflation rates as high as 1,500 per cent. In short, one-fifth of the world's population, the bulk of them living in the industrial countries, monopolize more than four-fifths of the world's income and virtually all promise of development.

What is more, although the …