Robin Hood at Geneva

The leaden skies of Geneva frowned down last week on a group of visitors distinguished for their diversity even in that international city. There strolled His Serene Highness, Prince Heinrich of Liechtenstein; there primped Cuba's demoniac-looking Che Guevara, whose seaweed beard and green fatigues seemed to make him quite a hit with the ladies. By day, the delegates from 122 countries filled every one of the 2,300 seats in the four-tiered Palais des Nations; by night, many of them savored Geneva's strip-teasers or Cadillaced across the border to the French casinos. Then they retreated exhausted to their hotels -- the representatives of the poorer nations favoring the posh, new Intercontinental and President, while the U.S. delegation mostly went in for the more conservative du Rhone. So began the twelve-week United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the biggest, the broadest and perhaps the most frustrating commercial forum in history.

Though the industrial nations are not enthusiastic about the conference, the black, brown and yellow nations pushed them into attending it, hoping to create "a new order" in world trade. The meeting opened with some blustery anticapitalist propaganda sent from Mos cow by Nikita Khrushchev, and then heard a high-pitched plea from U Thant for a worldwide "planned economy." With a Robin Hood gleam in their eyes, the underdeveloped complained vociferously of economic inequality. "You in the West tell us to work harder and we will get rich," said Nigeria's Minister of Commerce and Industry, Zanna Dipcharima. "Well, we are working hard, and we are getting poorer."

Cocoa & Castor Oil. In many ways, he is right. Argentine Economist Raul Prebisch, the chief theorist of the Geneva meeting (TIME, Feb. 21), told the delegates that the underdeveloped countries are draining off almost all the foreign aid that they receive because they have to pay so much to carry their foreign debts and because their export prices are falling. Ghana's cocoa crop, for example, now brings in 60% less money than it did in 1954, though the crop is now larger than it was then.

To close the widening trade gap, the underdeveloped want enforced agreements for higher prices and lower tariffs on their exports, reductions on freight and insurance charges, and subsidies for their budding industries. Who is to foot the bill? The industrial West, by paying more for everything from tin cans to castor oil. The West sympathizes with the underdeveloped but feels it unrealistic of them to expect to change every thing at once at the expense of Western consumers. Nonetheless, U.S. Under Secretary of State George Ball told the delegates that Washington now supports the concept of price-fixing world commodity agreements, at least in selected cases. In a surprising policy switch, he added that the U.S. would be willing to offer deep tariff cuts to the underdeveloped--without asking anything in return.

Splits & Subsidies. The U.S. and its allies came to Geneva disunited and unprepared, but there are also splits among the havenots. The former French African colonies, whose tropical products enjoy preferential treatment in the Common Market, are not about to endorse the Latin Americans' plea for similar treatment. Brazil proposed a radical program of subsidies and supports, but many realistic Latin American delegates are unwilling to press so hard. The Asians squabbled with the Africans, and the Iraqis with the Indians.

What will the meeting produce? With so many conflicting interests, proposals and threats, perhaps the only certainty is that the splits among its sponsors will deepen. But the have-nots do seem fairly well united behind a Soviet proposal to undercut the 60-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Communist nations are blackballed from GATT, and the underdeveloped view it as the rich man's guarantor of the unsubsidized order of world trade. GATT has enough Western support to survive; but there will probably grow up alongside it some broader if looser trade machinery that will operate under the unwieldy U.N. Even though the underdeveloped nations' inflated expectations will not nearly be satisfied at Geneva, many Western delegates had concluded even by the first week's end that the conference would leave its mark on world trade patterns.

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