Communist Offers To Afro-Asian Countries

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28794, 15 January 1959, Page 9

Communist Offers To Afro-Asian Countries

LONDON, January 14. The time seemed to be rapidly approaching when no leader of an Afro-Asian country, except perhaps Chiang Kai-shek would be able to continue rejecting economic offers from Communist states, says the “Financial Times” correspondent in Beirut, commenting on details emerging from the recent Afro-Asian talks in Cairo. Most products from Europe and the United States, the correspondent said, were still of better quality than those from the East, although exceptions should be made for Czechoslovakia and East Germany. But Afro-Asian countries generally appeared convinced that the West did not really want them to industrialise. The Communist states on the other hand were setting the pace by offering them what they wanted and agreeing to barter deals. Many industrialisation schemes in Afro-Asian states might be economically unsound, but Communists did not ask questions. “The West has rightly pointed out that a lot of raw materials, mostly cotton, which are bartered for capital goods, are then resold by the Communists at reduced prices, but the Afro-Asian countries are not unaware of this. "They know that when deals are made the Communists raise the prices of their exports in order to offset the losses they will make when they resell cotton elsewhere at below market prices. “For this reason the low rates of interest at which the Communist states have been granting credit are largely nominal. But what the industrialising Afro-Asian countries want is

capital goods—and they want them quickly. “Apart from Iraq or Kuwait, mostly Middle East countries know they cannot hope to accumulate enough foreign exchange to buy what they want from private Western concerns. That is why the new Sudanese Government, which is undoubtedly anti-Communist, is going to barter some of its unsold 1957 cotton crop for an entire sugar factory from Czechoslovakia,” says the correspondent.