World Citizens have always seen the need to structure the world society in such a way that the human rights and the basic needs of all the world’s people can be met. In an early statement of our aims, Stringfellow Barr wrote in Citizens of the World (New York: Doubleday, 1952) “Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to live.” Stringfellow Barr went on to add “I am grateful that I live in a time of crisis, a time when real decisions can be made because real issues have  emerged that the human mind can grasp, and real problems have been located that human will and human reason can solve.”

              Much of the early world citizen movement’s efforts centered on  the problem of hunger and the need to create food security.  Hunger and starvation are among the most visible signs of the failure to meet basic needs.  The emphasis on hunger also was the result of the leadership in the world citizens’ movement  of two officials of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd Orr, the first FAO Director General and Dr Jose de Castro, a Brazilian nutritionist, who was chairman of the FAO’s governing Council.  De Castro’s The Geography of Hunger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952) was a widely read and moving account of the danger of famine in the world. De Castro was later in the early 1960s the Ambassador of Brazil to the United Nations in Geneva. A more popular account of the ways in which modern science has placed in our hands for attacking world misery Let There Be Bread (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952) was written by Robert Brittain, also active in world citizen circles.

            Hunger and food security are, of course, only part of the development process, and world citizens were on the staff of the two independent commissions created by the World Bank to review and make recommendations at the end of two crucial decades for broad development efforts: The Pearson Commission Partners in Development (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969) and the Brandt Commission North-South: A Programme for Survival (London: Pan Books, 1980).  The Honorary President of the Association of World Citizens, Robert Muller, was Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and played an important role in economic and social affairs. He later became Chancellor of the University for Peace in Costa Rica involved in designing teaching programs on development and stressing the link between development and peace.

            In more recent years, world citizens have played a useful role in the United Nations system by stressing three crucial areas:
            1 Fostering a people-centered policy framework;
            2 Building human and institutional capacities;
            3 Protecting the environment.

            Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are rising in status and influence.  They are taking a ‘place at the table’ with States in international decision-making, and gaining leverage over States to make them embrace new norms.  NGOs have become indispensable to the human rights movement through their characteristic activities of analysis, investigating and reporting on State actions. Now is the time to bring these earlier world citizen efforts together into a concerted program to provide momentum for world-wide efforts for the protection of all human rights.   We need to stress, as Stringfellow Barr noted, the real problems “that human will and human reason can solve.” Thus, world citizens are bringing together a wide coalition of individuals and movements working to make fulfilling basic needs for everyone as the aim and the focus of development policies.