World Council of Churches, Fourth Assembly, Upsala, July 1968, Speeches Document No 5

1. Rich and Poor in World Society

The trouble about any discussion, these days, of the growing chasm between the prospects of developed and developing countries is the air of platitude, lassitude and repetition that hangs over the whole subject. Ever since the Decade of Development was launched, indeed, possibly as far back as President Truman's Point Four in 1949, the issues of economic and technical assistance, investment for development, trade reform, population' malnutrition andof course, the celebrated gap between rich and poor have been discussed and discussed and again discussed until, for many audiences, glazed eyes and sagging shoulders mark the overwhelming boredom which begins to appear as soon as the subject is brought up yet again. We have heard it all before. We know all about it. There is not a new thing or a fresh thought to be found in the whole issue. Like the poor, it is always with us and, again like the poor, it is something about which we are all too ready not to think.

But of course, we do not know all about the issue. Many of us do not even command the simplest facts ­ for instance, the momentum of population growth, the scale of the widening gap between developed and developing peoples, the rate of economic growth among the wealthy, the resources, therefore, which are going to be available for their use. Before we decide that the facts about the potential confrontation of rich and poor in our narrow planetary society are boringly obvious, we ought to have a clear idea of what they are.

First, then, population ­ according to recent estimates made by the United Nations9 the potential rise in world population over the next three decades could be from 3295 million in 1965 to 6994 million in the year 2000. But the bulk of this growth will occur in the developing lands. Developed peoples ­ including Japan9 Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ­ will increase from 1038 million to only 1574 million. In the rest of the world, the increase is from 2257 million to 5420 million.

When we look at estimates for wealth, an opposite equation appears. The vast growth is now in the developed lands. According to the estimates made by Kahn and Wiener in their book The Year 2000, the average per capita income of the industrially developed lands will rise from $1675 a year to $5775, For the less developed nations, the increase is from $135 to $325­. Developed incomes, which are 12 times larger today, will be 18 times larger at the end of this century.

This simply reflects their overwhelming capacity for further growth. If average rates of expansion are maintained over the next three decades, the gross national product of North America and Europe together will grow from today's $1,700,000 millions to over 58,000,000 millions ­ a fourfold increase for less than a doubling of population. Such are the margins for choice, for priorities in the decades ahead.

1. The Historical Background

With these facts in mind, we can ask the next relevant question which is: how did these disproportions come about? Once again, the fact of disequilibrium is much better understood than the reasons for it. Yet it is particularly important that information in this area should be correct. Otherwise the temptation to snap judgments and over­simplifications is almost irresistible. The reason is, unhappily, very common. It is the tendency of the well­to­do to attribute their good fortune to their own splendid efforts and attribute others' failure to irresponsibility and moral decay. "I thank Thee, Lord, that I am not as other men" is the universal prayer of the successful, whether we call them Pharisees or bourgeois or even pillars of society. To give a domestic analogy, one of the most prevalent beliefs of Victorian times was that the "good poor" could be distinguished by their thrift, energy, cleanliness and respect for their betters while the "bad poor)' drank, beat their wives, failed to touch their forelocks and so sank into unemployment and paupery. But during the Great Depression which lasted for nearly twenty years after 1870, the most respectable workmen where thrown "on the parish", having exhausted all their savings in a hopeless search for non­existent work. And the idea that the system might produce penury and not individual turpitude began to gather force from that time.

Today there are a hundred explanations for the gap between rich and poor nations which stress the idleness and frivolity of underdeveloped peoples ­ their "backward­leaning supply curves", their propensity to spend money on fun and funerals By the same token, these explanations light secret incense before the image of an Atlantic society which is hardworking, energetic, clear­eyed and responsible. But these, too' may well be the normal self-serving delusions of rich people in their own favor, the customary prayer of ­the Pharisee We have to know the reasons behind the facts of world wealth and world poverty and once we do, we find them considerably more complex than any simple faith in our own excellence.

The story begins with Europe in the eighteenth century with the first dynamic application of technology through savings to the market economy. The merchants who had built the cities, set up the corporations and traded to far Cathay were the core of the middle classes who preferred technology to theology9 and savings to displays. Britain first, the Low Countries, New England ? France>­ the new commercial society edged out feudalism, spreading to Germany and Eastern Europe after 1848, to Russia after 1860. It grew most rapidly in the United States where there was almost no feudal inheritance to set status? magnificence and paternalism before hard work and competitive trading. In Asia' only Japan made the changed After 1870' this small country9 very like Britain in its strong merchant class and internally unified market, took virtually one leap out of feudalism into the modern economy.

But elsewhere the technological revolution hung fire ­ for a variety of political and social reasons. India and Indonesia were already colonies of Europe and so not responsible for their own destiny. Latin America had been colonized by feudal Iberia; at the beginning of the 19th century, Spain and Portugal had changed neither their colonies nor themselves. Africa, a pre­feudal continent' still suffered the hemorrhage of slavery. The Moslem worldview simply did not yet include science and technology. Most tragic of all, the vast Chinese empire could not believe, until too late, that "outer barbarians" had anything to trade or sell. In all these continents ­ which to this day are still "developing" ­ the technological revolution could not gain any early or sustained momentum.

Yet all of them were drawn into the increasingly interdependent world economy based upon the new technology. Perhaps if the new methods had developed first of all in countries commanding such vast internal resources as the United States, a world system might have developed more slowly. It was for instance, the sheer size of China that helped to give it the "illusion" ­ in 19th century terms ­ of self­sufficiency. But Britain, with its small internal endowment, led the transformation and had interests and dependencies all round the world long before the new technology began to take hold. So had the maritime powers of Western Europe. So had New England and New York. Their pre­existing links and strands of foreign trade were now woven with such decisive technical breakthroughs as the railway, steamships, the telegraph and later refrigeration ­ into the seamless garment of the modern world economy. And the energy powering this transformation sprang above all from the voracious demand of the Atlantic states for raw materials.

These new industrial societies could not themselves provide for all the mounting needs of hungry mouths and hungry machines. Population doubling every generation, machines gulping down minerals, consumer tastes widening with growing middle class wealth ­ these were the forces of demand behind the formidable export of capital from Britain and Europe which, invested all round the world in mines, plantations, ports, transport systems and in all such subsidiary services as marketing, banking and insurance, returned to Atlantic markets a flood of cotton and wool, of wheat and meat, of copper and tin, of cocoa and coffee and sent back the new style manufactured goods to pay for them. Without this worldwide exchange', the rapidity of Atlantic growti1 would have been inconceivable. Technology may have created the world market. Put having a whole planet to draw on for its supplies gave technology its opportunity to race ahead. Otherwise the nightmare of Ricardo ­ of steadily rising costs, above all for food, gradually eliminating all possibility of profit and thus bringing the whole process of technological development to an end ­ might have been realized. Early industrialization would have joined pyramid­building or the search for the Philosopher's Stone as one of the interesting but relatively unproductive activities of collective man.

This exchange ­ of Atlantic manufactures against raw materials from almost everywhere else ­ created the basic pattern of the world economy. To a considerable degree' it has continued to underlie the relationships between the developed arid the developing nations ever since. Some of its consequences have, undoubtedly, proved stimulating and dynamic. The export sectors directly affected by Atlantic trade have been opened up to modern technology and its twin, rational administration. New ideas, methods and possibilities have been introduced. Scientific concepts, control over the vagaries of nature, wider education. large choices ­ all these advantages have been inserted into static, traditional economies, whether feudal or tribal' by the impact of Atlantic trade. Moreover, the steady if fluctuating rise in the world's commercial exchanges from the Napoleonic Wars to 1914 reinforced the not unfounded belief that the impulse of the market provided the strongest stimulant to international development and progress. It is only with hindsight that we can see that underneath undeniable successes, the market's largely uncorrected operations were producing a potential lopsidedness and instability in the world economy.

1. A Lopsided Exchange

In shorthand, one can say that the chief cause of imbalance outside the Atlantic area has been the relative failure of advancing technological change in the export sector of developing countries to stimulate decisive change elsewhere in the local economy. The reasons for this imbalance are inherent in the type of commercial exchange. Most of the capital for mines, plantations, power, transport, ports and services was provided by the world's Atlantic "lead sector" where capital had begun to accumulate rapidly as a result of rising productivity and where for a time the need for more raw materials became if anything steadily more acute, American and European enterprises provided most of the investment in wholly. owned subsidiaries ­ and the bulk of the management as well. Much of the local transport, docks and city services would have Atlantic shareholders. The shipping lines could be owned abroad largely by Europeans; so, too, would banking and insurance. In these circumstances, the bulk of the profits9 capital gains and even senior salaries stimulated by the export sectors would be shipped back to the Atlantic states. Local earnings tended to be confined to unskilled wages and, in certain countries suitable bribes to local politicians. And even this trickle of wealth was largely mopped up by the sale of imported manufacturers' shipped in by foreigners and often sold by large foreign merchant houses. The Gould concession in Joseph Conrad's brilliant and still timely novel Nostromo can be taken as typical of the 'dual economy" in which the great mine carries on its productive life virtually independent of everything save the murky politics of the small republic in which the ore was first discovered.

From such an exchange, little local capital can be accumulated And without capital, the essential technological transformations in other sectors cannot occur. Modernized education and widespread literacy, food production for the market as opposed to subsistence, industrial development to replace imports and to work up local materials ­ all such programmes require large inputs of capital. They require more ­ a vigorous, local entrepreneurial middle class. But such men are not produced in large quantities by a trading system whose management and skilled leadership tend all to be foreign. Where, as in most of Asia and Africa, government itself was also foreign ­ in other words, colonial ­ the political authority was not designed to redress the balance and compensate for the market's failure to provide general economic stimulus. For instance, colonial governments did not tax expatriate firms and divert some of the profits to local development. There was usually no tariff protection for local industrialization ­ India had to wait for a textile tariff until 1920. The largest source of revenue ­ import duties ­ helped to mop up local purchasing power still further and' since colonies paid their own way, much of this money was spent on colonial officials and their families' travel leave and pensions. Despite some instances of local diversification ­ among Brazil's European settlers in Minaes Geraes for instance, or the Parsees of Bombay the pattern outside the Atlantic world in 1914 was one of expanding export sectors and relative lack of growth elsewhere.

For this kind of economy' the distinguished French economist, the late Pere Lebret, coined the term l'economie de traite, the "milch­cow economy". And indeed if one looks at maps of North America and Europe and then of South America and Africa, the picture in the South with all the lines of communication running down to ports ­ which are almost the only cities ­ when compared with the interconnected spider web of transport and wide distribution of cities in the North, does give one the sense of looking at a kind of drainage system in which all the lines run to the sea­while? in between them, there is little enough physical evidence of growth and change.

In theory, the inter­war years should at least have sustained the greater stimulus given to the world economy by Atlantic growth. New technologies were thrusting up in Europe and North America. The triumph of the automobile meant rising demand for rubber and a great wave of new investment in petroleum. New metals and alloys sent out the search parties for once esoteric minerals ­ tungsten, vanadium, beryllium, boron. New techniques made possible the benefaction of formerly sub­grade ores ­ for instance, the fabulous riches of the African copper­belt. But underneath this apparent continuance of the old trend' changes occurred which began to weaken the market as the sole or at least chief provider of stimulus to the world economy.

Atlantic population ceased to grow rapidly. So the old increasing demand for food and fibres slackened, too. New technologies resulted in new requirements but they also produced effective substitutes. Rayon, petrochemicals, plastics, often invented to use up wasteful byproducts, began to undermine the price of traditional natural supplies. Many minerals could now be used more efficiently and economically ­ another factor reducing demand. As the 1920's developed, the prices of most raw materials began to slide downwards. This weakness reinforced others ­ for instance, the growth of tariffs in Europe which discriminated most sharply against manufactured imports and thus discouraged processing in the poorer lands. In Europe, the working capital for world trade was scarcer now that America had replaced Britain as the largest commercial power and had begun to sell steadily more than it bought, making up the balance with, on the whole, forms of lending that were too short term. In 1929, all these weaknesses, combined with the collapse of a speculative boom in the United States, precipitated the world into the deepest depression in history In the first nine months, world trade fell by two thirds and thereafter never fully recovered its old buoyancy. During that time. therefore, the world's market system contributed very little stimulus to further modernization in the developing countries ­ with the result that they 'entered the Second World War in no better shape than before the First, and with none of their basic structural difficulties mastered or even, in fact, understood.

It is perhaps really only in the last fifteen years or so, in the aftermath of decolonization, that the old assumption ­ of Atlantic growth extending the technological revolution all round the globe through the efficient agency of international trade and investment ­ has been submitted to really critical examination and its elements of truth and distortion sorted out. What is certainly true is that' since 1947, the world market as a whole has undergone an expansion unequaled in scale and length since the mid­19th century. World trade has grown, year after year, by not less than six percent. The liquidity to sustain it has been provided by America's readiness to invest heavily overseas, run a dollar deficit and convert it into gold. Sustained growth rates of between three and four per cent a year in the Atlantic group of states have underpinned this steady maintenance of market demand. If the market alone were capable of pulling the whole world economy upwards in the wake of Atlantic growth, then the last twenty years should have been triumphant proof of this. What in fact do we find?

1. Internal Obstructions to Growth

Not certainly, any evidence of complete failure. On the average, developing nations have managed to grow by 4.8 percent a year which is higher than the Atlantic average in the 19th century when boom and bust pulled down the overall level.

Savings rates in the developing world have risen, again on average, to some 15 percent of gross national product. About 80 percent of the capital devoted to development has been provided locally ­ and one reason for this change is that with the approach and coming of political independence' most governments in developing countries have started to tax business enterprise and negotiate more favorable terms for mineral or land concessions. For instance, Liberia's 50­50 share of the profits in its new iron­ore mines is a total contrast with its original rubber concessions. The foreign trade of developing countries has also grown even though their absolute share in world commerce has fallen.

All this is, of course, very far from the stagnation of the thirties. But equally it does not seem to have been enough to break completely with the old "milch cow" pattern. The developing nations are still primarily exporters of raw materials ­ they account for only five percent of the world's trade in manufactures. They are still over­dependent on one or two lines of export. They still lack that diversification of their economies ­ in agriculture, in industry, in education, in services ­ that alone can promise a full technological break through.

Why is this? The situation seems to be that on top of their old lopsided structure of change and growth confined largely to the export sector, the developing nations now face further inhibitions simply from the fact that they are trying to complete the process of modernization not in the nineteenth century but in the second half of the twentieth. Here we can pick out three such complications which 19th century developers simply did not confront at all. the first is well known. It concerns the imbalance between population and resources, particularly resources in food. The second turns on the development of a dangerous rural­urban disequilibrium. The third concerns the relationship between development and the scale of the economy. Each is new. Each has an inhibiting effect on the process of modernization. Each seems resistant to "normal" commercial solutions. Each raises again the issue whether pure reliance on the market is enough for successful technological change.

In the early 19th century, more productive agriculture and the beginnings of industry preceded modern medicine, public health and bursts of growth in population. In fact, a growing population alone gave Britain the "hands" needed in the early days of mass unskilled labour. Only families of twelve and massive immigration provided America with the manpower needed to open up a continent. By the time more skilled and better educated workers were required, family size had begun to stabilize. The demographic and economic curve tended to coincide. But Asia was crowded two thousand years ago. India and China had over 150 million inhabitants in 1789 at a time when the United States had five million in an empty continent, Since the, public health and the control of epidemics have been introduced long before general modernization in either farming or manufacturing, The per capita levels of feeding may well have started to fall in India by 1900. A ruined, bankrupt countryside was one reason, among many, for Mao Tse­tung's triumph with the peasants of China An annual spurt in population of 12 to 15 million a year in a country not yet fully modernized means quite simply that a four percent rate of growth is swamped by a three per cent rise in population' leaving almost no margin for further investment and hence quite insufficient capital for the technological breakthrough. Such a lack in agriculture can mean deepening malnutrition and, in a bad year, famine.

Modernization in farming is impeded by the second inhibition ­ the imbalance between urban and rural development. Most nineteenth century cities grew as a result of the manpower sucked in by expanding industry. in the cities, mortality rates were so high that no further runaway growth occurred. By the time industry became more mechanized 'and mortality diminished? family size had fallen. And food supplies had been sufficiently expanded, by more modernized methods on the farms at home and vast new supplies available overseas. Today' in the developing world, every great coastal city, built in advance of industry to serve the export sector ­ Rio, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Manila ­ is a target for rural peoples pouring out of stagnant countryside before farming has enough technological capacity to afford to let them go or the city enough urban employment to receive them. Squatters move in, like a flood. The figure for Rio, for instance, is more than 5,000 a week. They offer totally unskilled labour to industries which, to compete at all with Atlantic imports, seek to push forward with greater mechanization. A refinery can cost $30 millions, and employ only 350 people. But the migration goes on and the cities silt up with work-less multitudes. A 60 percent unemployment rate for young i~eople is not unusual in the world's urban ghettoes.

This question of urban­rural balance in employment is in turn bound up with the inhibition imposed by unsolved problems of scale. The developing countries are not entering a world market in which their standards and capacities set the pattern. They enter into competition with economies enjoying a century of industrial experiment and development largely based upon costly research and high capital investment. The example of the refinery may be somewhat untypical. ' But mechanization means doing without some labour, computerization without even more. No doubt it is =1 advantage to have the technologies already invented and borrowable. But it costs scarce capital to install them. And then they mass­produce and this means a large market is required to absorb what they pour out. Stagnant countrysides and unemployed urban masses do not supply such demand at home. The tariff barriers of developed countries designed to ensure the purchase of materials abroad and their processing at home check easy entry into Atlantic markets. A century ago, manufacturers were on a more equal footing. But technological advance has now swept the vanguard almost out of sight of economies only in the early stages of their technological transformation.

The point can perhaps be illustrated more vividly by looking not at the developing lands but at the contemporary plight of Europe. Here, too, economies confront a problem of scale. It was assumed that the European Economic Community, by achieving a wider market, would be able to modernize its methods and technology, increase its investment and achieve operations on the scale of its vast neighbors ­ of private capitalism in America, of state capitalism in Russia. But the first decade of the EEC has shown that not European so much as American firms are taking advantage of the new continental scale. Used to vast enterprises, doing more than half a billion dollars worth of business a year, financing a large part of their own expansion? spending ten percent of revenue on research and development, they simply possess the managerial and technical skills needed to operate in Europe's new 200 million market. European companies, on the whole ? do not. Europe cannot hope to compete with this new phenomenon of extensive American penetration of the new European market unless it is prepared to change a Common Market that is not much more than a free trade area with highly protected peasant agriculture into a genuinely unified continental economy whose Euro­companies can work unrestricted by traditional legal and political obstacles and can draw on a new readiness in Europe to accumulate its own capital and invest in its own technological research.

If Western Europe, after a hundred years of modernization and with one of the highest standards of living and learning in the world, can suddenly be confronted with critical problems of scale, it can be understood that the new mini­states of Africa or South East Asia or the traditional nationalisms of Latin America are even more inhibited by the need to modernize at a time when, in so many technological fields, the relevant size of operation is not the nation but the continent.

5, Patterns of Development

This historical analysis may suggest to some observers that nothing really effective can be done to foster world development in the face of such stubborn' inter­related and deeply rooted historical inhibitions to change and growth. Like Victorian economists confronting the pressure of rising population in a competitive labour market, they conclude that the workings of the system must lead inevitably to subsistence wages, massive misery and a level of poverty beyond human wit to cure. But the pessimists of our earlier domestic scene have, in fact, been shown to be too gloomy, It is at least possible that our new international gloom may be exaggerated, too. At least, it seems clear that, in a number of decisive fields, there are examples to be copied of successful development.

We can take three examples, each of central importance in counter1ng the three major obstructions to future growth. The area of agriculture is in many ways the most hopeful because it is here that science­based productivity has made some of its most startling advances in recent years. And since the accusation should not be made that examples have been taken from the most favourable areas for change, let us look at the agricultural revolution occurring now in one of India's most backward states in the midst and aftermath of a narrowly averted famine. In the Kosi district of Bihar, as a result of 200,000 acres of land coming under irrigation in 1966, the newly stabilized high yielding grains ­ strains that were unknown even five years ago ­ could be introduced at once, among them, Taichung paddy and hybrid maize. The results have been fantastic. The output of paddy per acre has increased from 650 lb. to over 4100 lb., maize from 820 lb. to 4000 lb. It is figures such as these that underlie the growing confidence in India that this year's harvest ­ of at least 95 million tons of grain ­ represents not simply a better monsoon but a much wider application of all the main technological improvements in agriculture, a new combination of water' fertilizer and improved seed' yielding four and five times the old output.

Such increases are enough to put food production well ahead of population growth. And it is at this point, when children survive and living standards begin to edge upwards, that policies for extending family planning begin to work. It was after the French Revolution had given the peasant the land and inheritance laws had decreed that all children should inherit that the bottom fell out of the French birthrate in the 19th century. Japan's great decline followed the widespread establishment of middle class standards and expectations. Of course, better knowledge about fertility and its effective control will play an increasing part. But parents' decisions remain the key, So development and responsible family planning must be seen as the Janus­head of a single process of modernization. It is unrealistic to pursue them separately.

Revolutionary changes in agriculture are not, of course, confined to India. They are the basis of the most productive peasant agriculture in the world ­ in Japan, followed closely by Taiwan. They can be found in Pakistan where a comparable revolution of water, fertilizer and better prices to the farmer has doubled the rate of agricultural growth in the Sixties. They reappear in East Africa in the land settlement schemes of Kenya. Wherever the farmer has genuine market inducements to produce and sell' he will run up a black market

in fertilizer before then planners have time to turn around. The inequity of such hangovers from feudalism as the land system in Brazil, under which two percent of the people own 70 per cent of the land, does not only lie in its social injustice. Absolute barriers to agricultural growth are sot by the fact that the mass of farmers have virtually no interest in increasing output on land which is not theirs, for money which will go to others. It is no accident that Japan leapt into modernization by way of the total abolition of feuda1 dues,

The example of Japan points to a further consequence of the technological revolution in agriculture ­ its impact on the second great problem in developing lands, that of devising and financing enough employment, in the countryside and in the exploding cities, to absorb the growing population, The point of departure is the increase in farm income. We can take a typical five acre farmer in India ­ Japan, incidentally, sets a legal limit of 7 1/2 acres on its farms. His net income at today's process using traditional methods and producing about 1.5 tons of grain, would be about $67.10 a crop. With new methods ­ water' fertilizer' improved seeds ­ this output increases to 7.5 tons. Even allowing for higher costs, his net income still rises to $400. If he can double­crop' it may double again. Thus he begins to follow the pattern in Japan where the Mieji Revolution either caused or accelerated an agricultural revolution. Between 1870 and 1911 farm output and income tripled. The result was a surplus to transfer to capital for industry. Yet the rise in farm income was still sufficient to buy u, the products of industry which in Japan were at first silk from village mulberries, cloth, bicycles, lamps, tiles, glass and household utensils of all kinds. A country­town exchange, stipulating both, could develop.

Unfortunately? in later efforts at development? Japan's example of the intimate link between agricultural reform and overall development has been somewhat overlaid by other models. Russia's emphasis on heavy industry? America's industrial supremacy, the inhibitions placed on local industrialization during colonialism? even the phrase "industrial revolution" conjured up the picture of smoking chimneys and gigantic steel r1ills. Agriculture received less than its share of capital and attention. Equally' however' the new hybrids had not yet been adapted to local use. Perhaps a big agricultural effort in the Fifties might have had less spectacular results and led to disillusion. What is certain now is that the sensational technological advances in agriculture coupled with farm­based industries ­ processing of agricultural supplies? production for farm needs ­ permit a new and much more hopeful approach to the whole problem of general modernization. Advanced agriculture? with double cropping, requires more' not fewer? workers on the land. Regional industrial centres with relatively small scale labour­intensive industries serving lively farmer demand, can expand local employment and even slow down the flood of migrants to the biggest cities. This emphasis does not exclude large scale industry, Fertilizer? farm machines, power and trunk roads require 1axge units. But they will not be left as Titans in an empty landscape. Compared with India's new black market in fertilizer, 200,000 tons of it had to be stored for lack of markets only four years ago. With smaller industry growing, big schemes will be the summits of a wider industrial range.

A new emphasis on agricultural modernization and rural­based industry will also make some contribution to the third problem ­ the problem of scale. Here we leave India which, if it can preserve its political unity, has the continental scale needed for full modernization. But in much of Africa and Latin America, mini­markets stand in the way of satisfactory growth. However? it is precisely the larger and more spectacular acts of industrialization ­ the steel mills, the large smelters, the motor car assembly plants, the refineries, the petrochemical complexes ­ that demand larger economic lebensraum if they are not to make the depressingly frequent contribution of running at a loss and thus contributing to the country's undevelopment* A government that believes its only hope of growth lies in hooking these monsters will not give them up to neighbors. every regional effort tends to break down on the issue: who gets the steel mill ? But if the glamorous central theme of modernization could be seen to be transformation on the farms, coupled with lively farm­based industry, governments agreeing to a rational regional distribution of larger units need not feel that they were losing out altogether on industrialization. They would still be growing just as fast as their neighbors and could continue growing while the tough bargaining on regional distribution of the larger enterprises continued. In the chequered story of East Africa's on­again, off­again Common Market, the present readiness to try again has coincided with a new realization of what land settlement and agricultural development can contribute to modernization. Perhaps it is precisely a lack of this perspective that underlies the halting progress towards a Latin American Free Trade area.

1. A Strategy for Growth

Against this background, any sense of hopelessness and defeat is clearly out of place. It obviously is possible to devise a rational strategy designed to accelerate the processes of growth Its essence would be quite simply to take the various historical obstacles to growth and stand them on their heads. No doubt it would take time. A century's bias is not likely to be canceled in less than four or five decades. But the task is not inherently impossible

At its core would lie the thorough mobilization of agriculture with its ancillary and complementary services and industries together with the reforms in land ownership, credit structure and access to markets needed to release the farmers' energies. This would be primarily the responsibility of developing governments. So would the negotiation of wider economic communities among themselves wherever national boundaries enclosed too small a market. On the side of the developed nations, the prime responsibility would be to revise their trading patterns so as to stabilize primary prices and to admit exports from developing lands ­ both raw materials and manufacturers ­ more easily into developed markets. And developed and developing lands alike would need to see that the flow of internal savings and of international investment was sufficient to ensure that the basic transformations ­ all of them expensive ­ in fact took place The "mixes" of policy would vary from country to country but they would all include some common elements ­ of saving, of structural reform, of wider trade.

The difficulty does not lie in devising a theory and strategy of change. The problem is to ensure that it is adopted. It cannot be left to drift. "Business as usual" will not bring it about. There ore, in fact, four very good reasons for arguing that the working of the international market, which first brought the gap between "North" and "South" into existence, cannot of itself bring about the changes necessary to create a better balance.

The first reason is that for the last fifteen years, during which both average rates of growth and capital accumulation have spurted ahead in the developing world, the "normal" methods of the market system have not in fact been used In the Sixties, the new dynamism has been sustained by public pro,grar.1mes of economic assistance of the order of $5 billions net each year from all sources. Some of this has been in grants, more in various forms of concessionary loans The total inflow of financial resources has been nearer $9 billions a year ­ a figure which incidentally includes gifts and purchases of arms whose impact on development can be dubious, to say the least. But if the full revolution in agriculture is to be realized, President Johnson's scientific advisers suggest that an additional $4 billions a year must be spent by the 1970's for fertilizer, improved seed and pesticides. One should presumably add as much again for the whole infrastructure of water? power, farm­to-market roads and farmers credits Even if cuts are made in less necessary investment ­ with arms, no doubt, at the head ­ these estimates imply a sizeable increase in external assistance.

Yet, at the moment, who would like to forecast such a possibility? On the contrary, the likelihood is for a general slash in aid in the wake of America's drastic axing of its program. It is true, as we have seen, that 80 percent of the investment underlying development has been produced locally. But the 20 percent from abroad represents the critical element of foreign exchange which, at this stage, is indispensable for such purchases as fertilizer, or, for the time being, food. No amount of local belt­tightening makes more foreign exchange available. Nor can enough of it be secured by any other route.

This fact brings us to the second reason for not relying on the market alone. Foreign exchange on a sufficient scale cannot be borrowed or secured through foreign investment. With a debt of over $40 billions and obligations of repayment that threaten to swallow a third to a half of their foreign exchange earnings by the 1960's developing countries cannot borrow much more. Nor do the bulk of them attract "normal" foreign investment. Nations with a per capita income of less than $150 make up more than half the developing world. They receive less than 1.5 percent of all foreign investment on commercial terms. The World Bank has had virtually to invent the International Development Association (IDA) to supply the urgent needs of the poorest nations. And today IDA is empty and having considerable difficulty in securing replenishment.

Foreign trade its no alternative. Here we reach the third reason for doubts about the efficacy of "normal" means. The pattern of world trade has not yet changed in any decisive way since the bias against developing countries was imparted to it long before the Second World War. Tariffs on made-up goods in contrast with free entry for raw materials still discourage diversification and industrialization in developing lands. The instability of primary prices continues. So does the pressure of substitutes invented by superior Atlantic research. It may be that the promises made at the second meeting of UNCIAD at Delhi will begin to reverse the process by stabilizing some prices, widening access to developed markets and increasing the flow of funds. But it would be a surprising result. Atlantic liberalism and generosity can hardly be said these days to be giving out a beacon light of inventiveness and progress.

And this brings us to the fourth reason for doubt. Hitherto, growth and development have been sustained. by the relatively smooth functioning of the Atlantic economy. Today, the richest member, America, is being forced to curtail its lending and spending abroad. As a result, the liquidity underlying the expansion of world trade may be about to be turned off. Western Europe, where the large surpluses lie' is not likely to respond with greater spending itself. It lacks America's scale and self-confidence and can all too easily fall back into separate, self­defeating, nationalist protectiveness. In these circumstances, the restrictive reaction all round may be to cut aid, lessen free trade and fail to put through the reforms in world liquidity ­ for instance, the proposals for new drawing rights to be issued through the International Monetary Fund ­­ which would be the creative answer to the disappearance of the American deficit. If all these restrictive possibilities are realized, the world economy will not face another decade of growth. It could be heading back towards 1929 ­ the climax of another decade when "normalcy" had been the catchword and disaster the result.

7. Beyond the Market

There should, however, be no surprise over the fact that the market working on its own cannot secure balanced growth and international equilibrium. It does not do so inside the nation. Over the last century, governments in the developed world have steadily abandoned laisse faire and total reliance on the market inside their domestic economies. This is not because the market is in any way an inefficient mobilizer and satisfier of needs and desires ­ the Russians are in the course of admitting its use ­ the fact is that it simply does not of itself produce a workable, equitable society The reason is simple. In unredeemed economics, to start wealthy or to start highly endowed wins all the prizes in a competitive system. The rich and skillful, commanding the investment and hence the profits and the capital gains either stay at the top or go there. The Pisks and Goulds and Vanderbilts, the Dukes of Westminster and Manchester, the Rothschilds of Europe, the serfs-turned­entrepreneurs of Czarish Russia could command incomes of over 2 million dollars a year tax free while dock laborers got by on two dollars a week. Societies accepting such gaps and injustices could not remain viable. Economically, wider purchasing power was needed to balance the market's fantastically growing power to produce and supply goods Politically' the majority who were poor began to take cognizance of their potential strength. Societies which introduced reforms ­ like Britain ­ survived. Czarist Russia collapsed. Today the gap between rich and poor is international ­ between a twenty percent Atlantic minority commanding 80 per cent of the world's investment and trade and half humanity still subsisting on the old two dollars a week, kind the underlying reason for this chasm is the same. In the uncorrected market, the rich stay rich and get richer. "To him who hath shall be given".

But in domestic society, the market is tamed and domesticated by civilizing policies and institutions Taxation transfers resources from rich to poor crud, through publicly endowed education, gives everyone the chance to develop talents and skills. This in turn increases their capacity to produce and hence to earn more wealth. So the market itself, under pressure from trade union organization and enlightened management, pays skills more highly and concedes wider fringe benefits. Since 1945, governments have added the extra stability of full employment and tile kind of management of demand which keeps demand and supply in balance on a rising graph. There is no secret about all this. We practice it every day. It is the very stuff of the new mass consumer economies of the developed world. Communist states are, in some measure, moving in the same direction. The trinity of taxation, high wage bargains and demand management precisely explain the fantastic growth in Atlantic resources and the more fantastic growth that could lie ahead.

The strategies proposed for world growth are not really far removed from the Atlantic trinity. The proposal that wealthy powers give one per cent of their gross national product in genuine economic assistance is, if you like, the first sketch of a world tax. The various proposals for trade ­ stable primary prices. better access to developed markets, offsetting finance to balance export earnings, a share in any new scheme for world liquidity resemble the improvement of the wage bargain inside the domestic market. Various estimates made for the needed scale of world investment ­ the indicative plan for world farming prepared by FAO, the estimates for agriculture put forward by the American President's scientific advisers, World Bank estimates of the funds developing lands could absorb, forecasts of particular foreign exchange needs as, for instance, in India's plans ­ all these add up, if you like, to a first tentative essay in world "demand management", to a world assessment not of what rich nations can "spare" but of what the tasks of modernization really require. The gap between such policies and our routine, everyday, perfectly acceptable domestic policies of growth and full employment is not wide. It is in large measure simply a projection to a wider area of what we take for granted at home.

8. The National Sickness

And there lies the rub. At present we have neither the education, the traditions nor the mechanism for making any such transfer. Each one of us still accepts our national boundaries as the inevitable limit of citizenship and obligation. We may cross them to fight and trade ­ we may, occasionally, cross them with acts of generosity in times disaster. We may even, as an act of grace, "give" economic assistance for a decade, with the understanding that it can be revoked whenever domestic pressures seem ­ as they do today ­ to build up other priorities. But the sustained and civilizing obligations which have stabilized and enriched our internal economics stop at the frontiers where the "foreigners" begin. So it is not much use pointing out that over the next three decades, our per capita incomes in the Atlantic world will quadruple, that by the year 2000, the income of 70 per cent of America's families may be above $10,000 a year, that by then the annual increment in Atlantic wealth may be of the order of $240,000 million a year. These .ire domestic figures and the entire increase can, according to our present way of thinking, be absorbed by that upward drift of income by which, in a law Professor Parkinson did not formulate, needs ride to swallow whatever money is made available for them.

But is this good enough for Christians? We confront a very odd situation. The followers of the Son of Man who loved the poor and rejected the Pharisees and all through his public life had no place to lay his head, find themselves, in the main, members of the exclusive white man's club with incomes rising into the stratosphere. They are largely to be found among the communities which still profit from the lopsided inheritance of the colonial world. Even if we reject all concepts of collective guilt and do not take on our heads the exploitation and slavery of earlier centuries, we cannot ignore the fact that some of our prosperity today is derived from the lies imparted to the world economy during the period of undisputed Western dominance. We are not thieves, perhaps. But to a certain extent we are "receivers" from an exploitative past.

This then is where we are ­ rich, exceedingly rich, in part by inheritance, growing richer, outstripping two thirds of our fellow men yet a remaining minority only of the human race. If, at this point, we argue that our situation does not require any particular change or response from us, then we implicitly accept the prevailing nationa1 exclusiveness of our society. We, too, are saying that obligations stop at domestic frontiers and our riches can be exclusively ours because the misery lies in ether continents and hemispheres. And this for Christian is an even odder response. Where, in heaven's name, can we discover any limit of a Divine purpose that the wide bounty of the universe has been designed chiefly to benefit twenty percent of its inhabitants? Where is Christ's word telling us to feed the hungry ­ provided they are British, to clothe the naked ­ provided they are German, to shelter the shelterless ­ provided they are Dutch? Was the Centurion told to become ~ Jew before his servant could be healed? Did the Samaritan check the nationality of the man in the ditch? On the contrary, the vision of a single humanity is carried in Christian faith to a degree of unity and interdependence for which only the organic union of the human body is a sufficiently vivid analogy. The human race, united under the headship of Christ, the Son of Man, the Second Adam, can be compared only with man's tota1 integration of flesh and bone and mind and spirit, with tee total unity of the whole human person.

This is the union we dare divide with historical frontiers and racial splits and barriers set all too often by territoria1 conquest. Nationalists, racialists, tribalists, we are no more "members one of another" than any other group in our affluent, heedless, successful society. But if Christians have, as we continuously say they have, some specia1 vocation ­ a salt, a leaven, a light set apart ­ may it not be, in these days of technological unification, economic interdependence and planetary communication, to accept and create 1 moral world community to match t e physica1 community which is already ours? If this is our insight and our vocation, then to transpose to the world the obligations and responsibilities of domestic society is not "any other business." It becomes the first priority of our political action. The transfer of one per cent of GNP, revised trading patterns, greater liquidity, a world strategy for development become simply, although in more technical terms, our eager response to the Lord's commands to feed the hungry and find God Himself in the least of these little ones.

No doubt we cannot hope in a day and an hour to persuade either ourselves or our fellow citizens to break out of our nationa1 restrictions. But we can make a start. In every wealthy country, we are minority large enough, if organized, to make a politica1 impact, to worry legislators, to swing elections, to work, in season .and out of season, to put the world's miseries above the upward drift of our ample domestic comforts or more urgent still, hove the world's vast expenditure on a sterile defense. If a hundred and fifty years ago, the conscience of Britain could be roused enough by the Abolitionists to get rid of a system of slavery in which massive vested interests were involved, we can hope that comparable work and pressure might begin to repeal our current slaveries ­ malnutrition, sickness, ignorance, unemployment, the death of children, the despair of breadwinners the deserted misery of old age. The only defeat is not to try. So in God's name, let us mobilize our resources ­ of political energy and exploding affluence ­ "Work, While it is Day".

(The author wishes to thank the Hon. George Miller, Chairman of the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the United States House of Representatives and his Committee for their permission to reproduce the historica1 analysis contained in the paper she presented to them on the occasion of their Ninth Meeting with the Panel on Science and Technology, January 23­25, 1968.)