The Press TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1950. Sydney Conference

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26119, 23 May 1950, Page 4

The Press TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1950. Sydney Conference

It is not easy to measure the success ' of last week’s Commonwealth Conference on South-east Asia. The delegates to the Sydney conference ! sat as a consultative committee charged by the Colombo Conference of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers to give shape and substance to an aim, put forward at Colombo, for co-ordinated and co-operative Commonwealth economic aid to the nations of South-east Asia. At Sydney there were differences of opinion about methods and about how far and how fast they should be pressed. In the end, conflicts of opinion were resolved in compromise. A modest initial programme of technical assistance to the countries of South-east Asia was agreed upon. A Commonwealth technical assistance scheme, involving an expenditure of £8,000.000 over three years, is tn be inaugurated in the next few months; and a bureau is to be set up at Colombo to coordinate the technical aid schemes. Decision was deferred on an Australian scheme to enable Asian countries to obtain emergency food and medical supplies from Commonwealth sources. The Governments of South-east Asian countries are to be formally invited to partake of Commonwealth aid and to prepare development schemes which will be considered at a further meeting at London in September. From this list of results it would be easy to say that the Sydney conference did not produce much in the way of hard, practical achievements, that it could not have agreed to less without failing utterly. But some encouragement is to be found in the fact that a practical beginning has been made. The task of reviving and lifting the economy of Asia presents problems as vast as those involved in the Marshall Aid programme. In many ways the Asian problems are the more difficult, because in Asia it is not a question merely of providing capital to restore former standards of productivity. In many cases a long programme of guidance, technical help, and training will be

necessary before financial assistance can be used to full advantage in development plans. The question ofoutside aid in these categories is complicated by the intense nationalism of all governments in Asia. Obviously, any Commonwealth aid plan must be limited by the finance available. In relation to the total need it is small, a fact eloquently expressed by the diffidence of the Sydney conference about the proposed sum of £15,000.000 for emergency food and medical supplies. “We have decided not to ” mention a sum in the communique ”, the leader of the British delegation (Lord Macdonald) said, “ because the Asiatics might “ consider £ 15,000,000 a paltry sum “ to spread over 500,000,000 people ”. The situation may well be transformed, of course, by the quickening interest of the United States in South-east Asia. But the Sydney conference had to deal with facts as they are, not as they may be. It proceeded, therefore, to work within known limitations, financial, human, and political. Its own movements were cautious—perhaps too cautious to give the momentum it might have given to the purpose it sought to serve. Instead, the conference transferred opportunity for major movement to the countries which may, if they choose, benefit from the Commonwealth aid plans. As Lord Macdonald has put it, everything now depends on schemes that are put forward to the Commonwealth by the South-east Asian countries themselves. A standard for judging the success of the Sydney conference may well be, therefore, the extent to which its actions and decisions are found to help the Asian countries to realise that the Commonwealth is anxious to assist them.