Little heed to be paid to P.M.?

Press, 24 February 1984, Page 3

Little heed to be paid to P.M.?

NZPA staff correspondent Washington The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, arrived in Washington yesterday for talks with President Reagan and his leading officials, but initial indications were that the Americans would pay little heed to his proposals for a global conference on trade and payments — a new Bretton Woods.

Sir Robert’s four-day stay in Washington is “an official working visit.” He will talk with President Reagan at the White House today, and have lunch with him there, and will also talk with senior American officials.

Topics are expected to include bilateral issues, such as the United States’ demand that New Zealand phase out export incentives by March 31 next year (Sir Robert is expected to ask for an extension) and a proposed American butter and cheese deal with Jamaica, which the New Zealand Dairy Board says would destroy New Zealand’s 40-year-old dairy trade with the Caribbean island.

The Americans propose to put 2000 tonnes of cheese and 2000 tonnes of butter on the commercial market there, with profits to go to a fund to aid Jamaican farmers.

Sir Robert told journalists soon after arriving yesterday that his main focus in Washington would be “the Commonwealth initiative on the trade and payments question.” He has campaigned in Washington before for a new conference similar to the one in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, which set up the post-World War II international monetary system, but the proposal has met with little enthusiasm so far from the American Administration.

Sir Robert said yesterday that “quite a lot of progress” had been made on this in London over the last few days.

Parallel initiatives were going on in the G-77 (a United Nations grouping of developing countries, originally 77 of them, but now many more) and the NonAligned Movement, he said.

“We found in London that the lines along which we

were working were parallel and indeed remarkably close,” he said. The Americans were involved in a committee in New York brought together by the G-77, which also included such countries as Canada and France, Sir Robert said.

“So I am interested to get a response from members of the Administration to see whether we can’t bring all this together, not with the idea of tackling the subject at the moment, but with the idea of getting some kind of agreement on a mechanism, a process, that in due time can look at the subjects.”

Sir Robert was to talk yesterday afternoon with the International Monetary Fund managing director, Jacques de Larosiere (he had earlier been scheduled to talk with his deputy), and said beforehand that he would like to see the I.M.F.’s staff increased — “there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re stretched to the limit” — and upgrade the I.M.F.’s “order of reference” so that it could face the problems of the 1980 s. Sir Robert said that he did not want to put any sort of time-frame on moves towards an international conference because most of the developing nations felt that what was needed was a conference to start with, whereas other nations felt the process should be started at a committee stage with weighted voting, a formula which now seemed to be “widely accepted.”

A senior State Department official, who briefed journalists yesterday on the Administration’s view, made it clear that although the American Government was well aware of Sir Robert’s “long-abiding concern” about a new trade and payments conference ... “we believe for our part that existing international institutions are adequate to cope with this. We believe that a United States-led noninflationary economic recovery provides one of the best tools for meeting the problem.” The official did add though, that “we are certainly prepared to hear his views and listen to him very seriously.”