Poor countries look to Paris conference

Press, 2 September 1981, Page 20

Poor countries look to Paris conference

By

GEOFFREY LEAN

in London

Two centuries ago a warrior chief called Naba Sorba was surveying his conquests in West Africa. He chose as his home a village dotted with mango, thorn and baobob trees, and called it Lougsi. The word embodies the idea: “Thus far will I go, and no further.” The name seems to sum up the village’s history, for little has happened in the last 200 years to improve the lives of its people. The phrase is perhaps too optimistic a description of the Upper Volta, to which Lougsi now belongs, for the country is steadily becoming poorer. Upper Volta'is one of the 31 poorest nations of the world, nations whose per capita incomes are expected to decline over the next five years. The 270 million people of these countries already live in desperate poverty, and on September 1 a United Nations conference opened in Paris to consider what can be done to save them from even greater destitution. The people of Lougsi will not be at the conference, but escape from their plight will depend largely on what it decides.

Half the children of Lougsi die from malnutrition and diseases like measles, whooping cough, diarrhoea and amoebic dysentery. There is not enough food, not enough clean water. Although the village is only 20 kilometres from Ouagadougou, the capital, it can go 18 months without seeing a doctor. There are few tools in the village, not even a saw or a plough; the only agricultural implement is the “daba,” a primitive hoe. There is no school and only a few people can read and write. A third of Upper Volta’s people live below the subsistence level. Life expectancy is 43 years. The country’s economy is relatively well managed and it has the laissezfaire approach which Western governmerits seem to believe is the answer to poor countries’ difficulties. Yet its gross

domestic product has declined over the past 10 years. The World Bank’s World Development Report published in August says: “On almost any set of assumptions, Upper Volta faces abject poverty for decades to come.” Much the same could be said of any of the 31, now officially called Least Developed Countries. Most are landlocked, like Mali and Chad, mountainous, like Bhutan or Ethiopia, or small islands like Cape Verde and the Comoros. Many have desperately poor soil; some are being squeezed by the relentless march of the deserts. Mr Gamini Corea, secretary-gen-eral of the Paris conference, says: “They are on the periphery of the periphery.” The gap between them and the rest of the Third World is widening fast. Back in 1960, the 31 had an average gross domestic product of $177 a head, half the level for developing countries as a whole. Now, after 20 years of struggle, they have raised it to only $2Ol. Over the 1980 s they might on very optimistic assumptions, hoist the figure to $219 a head against a developing country average of $931. In fact their per capita G.N.P. as the. conference papers predict, is much more likely to decline. Food production has already slumped and is expected to fall further; many of the countries already face starvation. They have worked hard at exporting raw materials. Over the 1970 s they almost doubled exports, increasing volume more rapidly than Third World or rich countries. But this has done them little good because raw material prices have declined savagely throughout the decade. Meanwhile the cost of their imports has shot up. They were hit harder by the rising cost of food and manufactured goods from the West than by oil price rises; they are so little developed that they use relatively little energy. As a result, they have had to

hold back on buying from abroad, and now import little more than they did in 1970, although their populations have risen by a quarter. Despite this action to balance their books, their debt rose from $2.3 billion in 1970 to $ll billion last year. Oddly, the poorer developing countries get less than half as much aid per head as middleincome ones. The trouble is that they are not as influential or as commercially important. At the United Nations conference on Trade and Development in Manila in 1979, rich nations agreed to double aid to the poorest countries as soon as possible. At the Paris conference, the poor expect that promise to be honoured. — Copyright, London Observer Service.