The Third World and Its Wants

The struggle has been defined variously as rich v. poor, Southern Hemisphere v. Northern, developed countries v. undeveloped. The protagonists are the advanced industrial nations (Western Europe, North America and Japan) v. the nations of the "Third World" (Latin America, Africa and Asia), an extraordinarily diverse group that, for the moment at least, has achieved solidarity for what it sees as its common purpose. Conflict between the two groups has taken on the proportions of global class war.

This week the battleground is situated on the banks of the East River in New York City, where a United Nations Special Session on Development and International Economic Cooperation is assembling. The U.N. meeting promises to be a pivotal event in the deepening confrontation between the affluent and the newly combative poor. Undoubtedly, Third World orators will restate what is quickly becoming their principal theme: the poor nations have been ruthlessly exploited by the rich, thereby causing many of the Third World's seemingly intractable development problems; and the rich must now make a special effort to help the poor countries catch up--by, among other things, paying high prices for their products and increasing the level of their aid.

Certainly, representatives of the industrialized "First World" will reject much of the overblown rhetoric of the developing countries. Just as certainly, the "Second World" of the Socialist countries will make a show of complete support.* Nonetheless, the significance of the meeting may very well lie in the fact that leaders of the industrial world are likely to listen more attentively than ever before to reasonable Third World demands. As Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told TIME'S diplomatic editor Jerrold Schecter in the Middle East: "At the least we must have a dialogue. We cannot be in isolation from nine-tenths of humanity." Last week Kissinger had gone through at least eight drafts of a speech that will underscore the problems of the developing world and, in an aide's words, "how we can move from rhetoric to problem solving." Although extended negotiations in the Middle East have forced Kissinger to alter his plans for attending the session, his speech will be delivered by recently appointed U.N. Ambassador David Moynihan. Like Kissinger, Moynihan has long favored a comparatively hard-line approach to the Third World, especially toward the latter's habit of blaming the industrial world for many of its afflictions. In a controversial article in Commentary magazine, Moynihan chided the less developed nations for pursuing a "politics of resentment."

In concrete terms, the Kissinger-drafted speech will urge greater aid for the poorest nations from the industrial states and the newly rich oil producers. It will renew his call for a world food reserve of 60 million tons to provide a cushion against crop failures. To solve balance of payments problems, it will suggest giving International Monetary Fund loans to countries that suffer trade shortfalls. In the face of opposition from key Cabinet members like Treasury Secretary William Simon, Moynihan is expected to announce that the U.S., for the first time, may be willing to tamper with traditional free-market mechanisms by entering into commodity pricing agreements with producer nations.

The developing nations arrived at the U.N. well rehearsed. Only last week 81 nonaligned nations held a six-day conference in Lima, Peru, as a kind of curtain raiser for the U.N. session. With hundreds of delegates on hand, including 55 foreign ministers, the Lima meeting was also a showpiece for the variety and strength of the Third World's forces. There were Africans in bright flowing robes, Arabs bundled in business suits against the chilly, gray Lima winter, Indians wearing Nehru suits--and the world's only woman Foreign Minister, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh of South Viet Nam.

Anti-American Cast. Peru's President Juan Velasco Alvarado, decked out in his beribboned general's uniform, clearly relished his role as host. He gave the keynote address, a self-congratulatory 50-minute oration on Peru's left-wing revolution and the aspirations of the entire nonaligned group. But at week's end an utterly unexpected coup (see page 16) brought not only Velasco's role as host but also his role as Peru's leader to a crashing halt.

Though the main item on the agenda at Lima was the world economy, the conferees spent a great deal of time on politics, mostly with a decidedly anti-American cast. Such "nonaligned" nations as North Korea and North Viet Nam were welcomed as full members of the conference. So was Panama, where U.S. control of the Canal Zone drew the sympathy of the delegates. Excluded from participation were South Korea and the Philippines, apparently because both governments permit American troops on their soil.

Another political ritual concerned the Arab-Israeli conflict. Syria, joined by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was also given membership during the Lima conference, pressed for a resolution that Israel be expelled from the U.N. The measure was supported by most of the Arabs. "The condition for Arab aid is support for their fight against Israel," explained a Latin American diplomat. But Egypt, concerned about jeopardizing Kissinger's efforts to reach a new interim peace agreement, opposed the Syrian proposal. So did several Black African countries and others like Singapore, Argentina and Indonesia. In the end, the conference adopted a mild, inconclusive resolution urging Israel to evacuate occupied Arab territory.

After a week of endless speeches (14 were scheduled for one day; only six were delivered) and indecisive wrangling, the Lima conference seemed mostly to have reiterated arguments made in previous Third World convocations. But coming at a time when the industrialized world is beginning to show more sympathy to the poor countries' demands, the meeting at Lima served to underline two momentous facts about the rich-poor confrontation:

1) For much of the Third World, the international economic system has failed to produce what Kissinger has called "essential well-being." Half of the world's 3.9 billion people have per capita incomes of less than $200.

2) The Third World has become a sufficiently powerful (if diffuse) political force to require serious attention.

In the early 1960s, the U.N. launched its much vaunted Development Decade, setting a minimum target of 5% annual growth for what was then called the "lesser-developed countries" or LDCs. In 1970, with many of the first decade's plans still unfulfilled, a Second Development Decade was decreed, and the growth target upped to 6%. As of 1973, however, only a few of the LDCs, most of them oil exporters, had achieved a 6% growth rate. The rest, with a total population of 1.5 billion, kept a meager 2.8% ahead of the population increase.

At the same time, the Third World was undergoing a profound change. Especially with the staggering rises in the cost of fuel and food, the developing countries have split into two categories: those, that can generate wealth by exporting natural resources and those desperately poor countries that still have to import both oil and food grains. Thus oil has transformed nations like Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and the Arab sheikdoms into a kind of plutocracy of the poor. Countries like Zaire and Zambia (copper), Morocco (phosphates) and Malaysia (rubber) also gained large amounts of foreign exchange. Still a third group, including South Korea, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico, exports enough manufactured goods to cushion the impact of worldwide inflation.

But then there are the utterly impoverished nations--countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Chad and Haiti. These constitute what is now being called the "Fourth World": countries with burgeoning populations, few natural resources and an undeveloped industrial base. According to World Bank President Robert McNamara, who will issue a grim survey of the world economy this week, there are some 900 million people in this Fourth World who subsist on incomes of less than $75 a year. "They are the absolute poor," said McNamara, "living in situations so deprived as to be below any rational definition of human decency."

Clearly, in many ways the resources-rich states have more in common with the industrialized world than with the desperately poor. Yet the developing world--Third and Fourth alike--has somehow managed to maintain an extraordinary unity. One reason for this unity is that the vast majority of developing states share one overriding experience: they emerged in the past two or three decades from long periods of colonial domination by the West. As independent states they all seem to feel that their problems are mainly due to their having been plundered by the imperialists. Whatever their differences, all now seem to be caught up in the exhilaration of the counterattack.

Historians of the future will probably see this counterattack as one of the major events of the 20th century. In 1961 the first conference of nonaligned nations was held in Belgrade under the sponsorship of Yugoslavia's Tito, Egypt's Nasser and India's Nehru. The 1970s saw a rapid growth in their power and sense of purpose as well as in their tendency to blame the industrialized West for many of the world's problems. The U.N. Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, was marred by Third World claims that the rich nations, having gained their wealth by polluting the environment, now wanted to curb pollution and thus keep the nonaligned poor. The 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest ran into a similar problem. China, which has one of the world's most comprehensive birth-control programs as well as its largest population (more than 800 million), charged that overpopulation was not a real concern for the poor countries. The issue, lectured the Chinese, was the draining away of the world's resources into the hands of a minority of industrial, consumer-oriented countries.

It was also last year, in April and May, at the U.N. Special Session on Raw Materials and Development, that the nonaligned nations formulated a comprehensive economic program. Dominated by Third World figures such as Algeria's President Houari Boumedienne, the special session endorsed two resolutions. One was a Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order; the second was a Program of Action designed to bring about the new order. Though the U.S., Japan and West Germany voiced strong objections to the resolution, the General Assembly last December adopted the Third World's position by passing a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. The main points of the three resolutions are an accurate guide to what the Third World wants:

SOVEREIGNTY OVER RESOURCES. The Third World wants full "sovereignty of every state over its natural resources and all economic activities." This includes tighter regulation of multinational corporations and the unrestricted right to nationalize foreign holdings--and to pay compensation according to national law, regardless of international law governing such situations.

BETTER TERMS OF TRADE. Dependent on raw materials exports, the Third World countries want worldwide commodity agreements that would assure them stable markets and prices. These in turn would be indexed to the cost of their industrial imports from the First World countries. Producer cartels--little OPECs--would be internationally sanctioned as a means of "accelerating development" of the poorer nations.

GREATER FINANCIAL AID. The Third World wants not only an outright redistribution of the wealth; it wants it faster than ever. The industrialized nations should increase their lagging aid donations, pledge a higher proportion of their G.N.P.s to development assistance, and transfer more of their technology and more of their productive facilities to the underdeveloped nations. Hard-pressed Third World countries should have their foreign debt obligations eased and in certain cases even canceled.

Much of what the Third World says about the unfairness of past economic relations is at least partly true. During the period of colonialism and in the two decades that followed World War II, the industrialized West did import Third World products at very low prices; foreign companies made huge profits, and comparatively little was poured back into the producing areas.

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to find fault with the demands of today's Third World. For one thing, in the proposed New International Economic Order, it is not only the First World that will pay. Higher oil import costs alone have already increased the less developed countries' burden by a staggering $10 billion a year, almost as much as the total grant aid received by these countries in 1973. For the time being, these higher costs can be balanced by large-scale assistance from the OPEC states. But that too will change. World Bank economists estimate that OPEC this year could afford to supply about $4.5 billion in aid, or about 10% of its balance of payments surplus. By 1980, according to the World Bank's McNamara, many of the OPEC states "are likely to reduce their level of aid as their imports rise and their trade surpluses diminish." Economists argue, moreover, that some of the more radical demands will in fact prove to be self-defeating. By dangling the threat of nationalization with only token compensation, they are likely to discourage badly needed capital investment.

Despite these problems, it is clear, as Kissinger was ready to say this week, that increased cooperation between the developed and the developing world is essential. The failure to work together is fraught with some very real dangers. For one thing, the producer states possess an enormous potential for disrupting the flow of vital materials to developed countries. Four countries (Chile, Peru, Zambia and Zaire) control fully 80% of the exportable copper in the world; two (Bolivia and Malaysia) account for 70% of the tin; another four (Jamaica, Guinea, Surinam and Guyana) are responsible for 95% of the bauxite exports. Organized in cartels, these producer states could boycott industrialized countries or engage in disastrous price gouging.

There is a still more alarming, if more remote prospect. Many of the poorest countries, though on the brink of mass famine, have enough resources and technology to produce atomic weapons. India exploded its first bomb 16 months ago; other states like Pakistan could follow suit. It is unlikely but not inconceivable that these economically desperate states, feeling they have nothing to lose, might try to use nuclear blackmail to get more help from the West. As Economist Robert Heilbroner writes in his highly pessimistic An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, "The resort to ultimate tactics is surely not to be dismissed as mere fantasy."

It may be that a conciliatory, but not indulgent approach to Third World demands will avoid these dire possibilities. The response to Kissinger's declaration to the U.N. this week, with its emphasis on practical, nonideological solutions, will be a key test of the effectiveness of that approach. Many observers fear that a reasonable outcome is foredoomed by the extremist rhetoric at Luna and the highly charged emotions of Third World leaders.

In fact, some moderation has been evident among the nonaligned. One indication was the Lima delegates' rejection of the radical demands on Israel last week. Recently, in what seemed an invitation for dialogue, Pakistan Ambassador Iqbal Akhund told the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council: "If we are to use the parliamentary analogy, the minority--the loyal opposition, if you will--has not only the right but the duty to propose alternative policies."

In the course of suggesting "alternative policies," it is possible that the rich nations can not only defuse the growing conflict with the poor nations but also transform the politics of resentment into a policy of cooperation.

*The Socialist countries, however, are far less forthcoming with material help. In 1973, for example, the Second World provided developing states with $1.4 billion in aid, compared with the First World's $11.9 billion.

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