Help For Asian Trade

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31315, 10 March 1967, Page 14

Help For Asian Trade

In an effort to assist developing countries in a positive manner, New Zealand should adopt a new role in Asia based on helping to establish good world prices for the major products on which the “mono-economies” of Asian countries relied, according to Mr R. Delecluse, a Frenchman who has worked in Asia for the last 11 years.

Both New Zealand and Australia needed to grow out of a charitable approach to developing countries, feeling sorry for them, and looking upon aid to these countries as extra, he said in Christchurch last night. The developing countries

could not solve their problems alone, but they wanted trade, not compassion. At present world prices for products from Asia, such as rubber, were set by international groups at which hard bargaining was the rule, Mr Delecluse said. If New Zealand was fully committed to helping Asia, its representatives would argue for a good price and not the lowest which could be bargained out. He felt that such “pricesetting” should be done at a diplomatic level, rather than at a commercial one, he said. “We cannot leave trade in the hands of the businessmen alone.”

Mr Delecluse, who will soon return to trade union work in Paris, has been working as an adviser to the International Young _ Christian Workers’ Associaion and Roman Catholic adult study groups. Assisting developing countries had to be accepted as an essential part of our task in

this part of the world, Mr Delecluse said. There needed to be a complete re-thinking of the situation, an effort to get to know Asian countries, and a giving of at least 1 per cent of the national income in aid.

At present developed countries were giving less and less in aid, and he suspected it was because they saw it -was not the solution to the countries’ problems, he said. In his opinion, aid should be increased but given through international agencies which would assist the Asian countries.

Mr Delecluse said that his recent work in Asia had been concerned with helping people of many nationalities adjust themselves to city and flat living, and trying to do something about industrial unrest in Singapore through establishing a course on industrial relations for trade union members.