U.S. CONSIDERING ASIA

Press, Volume C, Issue 29674, 18 November 1961, Page 11

U.S. CONSIDERING ASIA

(N Z J’.Av-Reuter— Copyright)

NEW YORK, November 17. The United States, in working out new trade relations with the European Common Market, was thinking of arrangements that wonld benefit other free countries, toctadtng those of Asia, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Mr Alexis Johnson, said yesterday. Ho spoke at the fourteenth annual Far East conference sponsored by the Far EastAmerican Council of Commerce and Industry. In reference to America’s future relations with the Common Market, Mr Johnson said: “Your interests and the interests of the countries of Asia are much in the forefront of our minds in this development. “We are very conscious that the interests of the United States are no less to the Pacific and Asia than

they are in the Atlantic and Europe. "While we look forward to cloaer relations with Europe, we equally look forward to closer relation® with Asia, including tile field of commerce and industry. "Thus to looking toward the working out cf new commercial and trade relationships with the great industrial complex represented by the Common Market, we on our part are not thinking to terms of exclusive arrangements which would discriminate against any other part of the world. “Rattier to accordance with our long tradition, we are thinking of arrangements under which the benefits would also accrue to other free countries, including those of Asia.” Mr Johnson also said that Communist China was losing the economic race to Asia. United Press International reported. He gave these figures:—

Food production In Communist China today was "substantially below” the level in 1056 when China’s “great leap forward” was supposed to begin. But there were now 35 to 40 million more Chinese to feed than there were than. In 1958 staple food production was around 210 million tons. In IMO it was about 185 million tons. Tbe year IMI might be only a few million tons above that. Average food rations to Communist China were now less than a minimum subsistence diet The food shortage bad only partly been made up by purchase of some six million tone of grain from capitalist countries. The “puncturing" at the great myth of Communist ability to produce goods in Asia might be “the most profound development” of this decade, he Mid.