A WORLD MARSHALL PLAN
ROSS, SHERWOOD
A World Marshall Plan by SHERWOOD ROSS In Africa's tropical rainforests, in the A proliferating shantytowns of Latin America, in Asia's teeming villages, on the desert rims of the Mideast, at...
...However unsung, the story of these agencies—hopefully the embryo of a brighter world—is nothing less than astounding...
...In India, Kerala's food riots are but a foretaste of what Asia can expect in 1980...
...Can the agency wipe out illiteracy...
...Even so, to date it has protected 80,000,000 people from yellow fever...
...and provide health care, disease control, vocational guidance, and emergency aid to millions more...
...and wiping put pest losses (Iran)—said to devour one tenth of the world's produce...
...The United States has furnished $2 billion in surplus commodities to India alone...
...On another front, WHO six years ago wiped out smallpox among the inhabitants of twelve nations...
...Not long ago, in Ceylon, fishermen put out each day in sail-driven log rafts, and returned with an average catch of fifteen pounds...
...Such countries are on a collision course with chaos...
...Dissatisfied with this gain, Dr...
...This view is shared by the twenty Latin American states which met three years ago in Alta Gracia, Argentina...
...First, the very scale of the plan would require amounts dwarfing the $11 billion or so invested by the United States in Western Europe over a four year period (although a substantial part of this was for military goods...
...In many quarters, unilateral aid is more and more resented...
...Ideology had little place in the lopsided 83-20 vote which made the new trade organ official...
...Obviously, a key aspect of any World Marshall Plan must be the allocation of monies supplied to the United Nations on terms other than the banker's "will-it-pay...
...that the growth rate of the poorer nations is actually slowing down...
...John Bowers, its deputy director, estimates that at a cost of about $7 per individual, only $2 billion is needed to launch a world-wide campaign...
...Unhappily, ECSOC's deliberations get no more publicity than a conference of CIA agents...
...aided sixty-four nursing projects...
...Increasingly, thoughtful observers of the world scene are backing up the Secretary General...
...Forced to cut its budget by fifteen per cent—to $30,000-000—it could launch only twenty-nine new projects...
...Americans are performing a similar service in Brazil...
...First, those which minister to the immediate needs of mankind, such as the Children's Fund (UNICEF) and WHO, the World Health Organization...
...In countries already constricted by debt, the need for "soft" loans—long term, low interest—is tremendous...
...Nine years ago, for instance, it launched a drive to enroll 40,000,000 Latin American youngsters in school...
...The time to begin is now...
...And, despite extensive educational programs, there were 36,000,000 more illiterates in India in 1961 than in 1951...
...Experts from developing nations provide valuable services also...
...It is also hard at work opening libraries, museums, and scientific centers indispensable to educating the skilled, responsible citizens needed by the emerging nations to underwrite industrial and humanitarian progress...
...Part of the investment lag is prompted by shortcomings of the emerging countries, contends George D. Woods, president of the World Bank...
...Actually, there is no other organization on the horizon capable of undertaking so vast and costly a program...
...This is not much to spread culture and science and to combat illiteracy among nearly one billion people...
...even if it costs $100 billion or $500 billion to execute, its launching must become the first priority of this generation...
...Third, the affluent world, now absorbed in a struggle of ideologies, must be educated to the perils of delaying a World Marshall Plan...
...There is no population control program yet in operation under U.N...
...All this is to the good, but far too few loans, and not enough "soft" loans, are being made...
...On the positive side, so vast a proposal might draw many nations, including China, out of the blind alleys of their narrow sovereignty and onto a common ground in which peaceful cooperation could be rooted...
...furthering more intensive land use—in Thailand rice paddies now double as fish ponds...
...A World Marshall Plan by SHERWOOD ROSS In Africa's tropical rainforests, in the A proliferating shantytowns of Latin America, in Asia's teeming villages, on the desert rims of the Mideast, at least one million human beings whose lives might be saved are dying each month...
...reporters scribble away furiously...
...Surely a way can be found to rid that region of its notorious slums and rural poverty through companion programs...
...It is unrealistic for us to expect to achieve world peace in a world of poverty...
...The island imported three-fourths of its fish...
...United Nations officials estimate that hunger and preventable disease will claim the lives of 11,000,000 children this year alone—approximately 3,500,000 from hunger and diseases associated with malnutrition...
...Finally, a World Marshall Plan is the best hope for the survival of rich and poor alike...
...In follow-up assaults on hunger, FAO last year supplied 773 outboard motors to power native craft in Dahomey, East Pakistan, Togo, the United Arab Republic, and Zanzibar...
...Life-giving waters flow unharnessed to the sea...
...The framework and spirit for a World Marshall Plan exist...
...programs are operating...
...Yet UNICEF's campaign to keep children alive and healthy has been offset by the population onslaught, greatest where the poverty is greatest...
...The impact of these outlays is out of all proportion to the salaries paid and administrative fees incurred...
...With a mere $20,000,000 budget and only 1,000 experts to eradicate hunger, FAO is putting up a heroic delaying action against famine...
...agencies are doing splendid work, among them the International Labor Organization, the International Atomic Energy Commission, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunications Union...
...the crucial issue is one of leadership and will...
...But the new U.N...
...M. G. Candau, director-general of WHO, is pressing for total victory...
...Last year the Bank made a $100,000,000 loan to help develop industry in southern Italy, a noble and necessary goal...
...helped fifteen countries bring trachoma under control...
...Yet, FAO's Sen asserts, "If there is to be even moderate improvement in food consumption levels, mankind's food supply must be doubled by 1980 and tripled by the year 2000...
...UNESCO could head up such a drive —if it had the funds...
...Mankind urgently needs a World Marshall Plan launched under the flag of the United Nations...
...But the system of financial aid will have to be altered, and inevitably will require the widespread use of loans of such low interest and long terms as to constitute practically "giveaways," in addition to outright grants...
...In ECSOC's chambers, delegates take up such mundanities as desalting the sea, harnessing the atom for peaceful uses, defusing the population bomb, ministering to the sick and the blind, and fretting over the sorry lot of human rights, the status of women, the slave trade and dope traffic, world hunger, poverty, ignorance, injustice— all the ills haunting that noble phrase from Article 55 of the U.N...
...they are allocated in a crazy-quilt fashion, and are frequently inspired by politics, not economics...
...Rumania with Costa Rica...
...This is particularly so for projects which, of themselves, are non-remunerative, but vital to economic advancement—hospitals, public housing, education, communications systems, and the like...
...Second, those involved in long-range planning and development, which would include the U.N...
...Our poverty makes it impossible for us to stockpile goods to await a rising market...
...Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has similarly advocated that the United States and other nations work more through the United Nations...
...Director Henry R. La-bouisse says 600,000,000 children are suffering from "hunger, disease, lack of education, or all three...
...Take WHO...
...Founded in 1946, the World Bank had loaned $8 billion to support trade and investment projects...
...Officials of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) say that 1964 marked a gloomy turning point in modern history—the first year in which there was actually less food on mankind's dinner plate than the year before...
...The world's entire stock of surplus foods, found largely in U.S...
...Together with health, agrarian, and educational strides, long-range economic planning is an urgent necessity...
...For Latin America, where today's level of living is actually lower than in 1941, Chilean President Eduardo Frei foresees "violence and disorderly social chaos" unless sweeping reforms are achieved...
...Charter, "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom...
...Over its lifetime, UNESCO has spent $60,000,000 to finance thousands of expert missions to poverty-stricken lands, and for granting 3,800 fellowships in science studies...
...At the time of his New York visit, Pope Paul called upon the affluent nations to channel more foreign aid through U.N...
...probably a like number will awaken tomorrow to another day of suffering from some chronic complaint—trachoma, malaria, yaws, parasitic infestation, leprosy, tuberculosis...
...Second, an enormous "skills bank" of knowledge and technology would have to be developed among the peoples of the emerging nations...
...Still, it has just scratched the surface of man's need...
...Solid progress, to be sure...
...Tanganyika's Julius Nyerere, a prominent spokesman for this group, declared, "The terms of trade have continually moved to our disadvantage...
...Happily, the framework for a World Marshall Plan already exists in the form of the specialized agencies of the United Nations, coordinated by its Economic and Social Council (ECSOC...
...These were only a few of the 86,000 technicians trained under Special Fund auspices during its six-year lifespan...
...Yugoslavia voted with Uruguay...
...personnel and an annual budget running currently to $350,000,000, which is more than matched by the various countries in which U.N...
...economic growth has fallen far behind the goals set by the U.N.'s General Assembly, which established a five per cent per year growth rate target for the "Development Decade" of the Sixties...
...Most of the victims are children...
...Fourth, governments must better grasp the magnitude of the United Nations' victories against poverty and its ability to mount a bold, massive effort to create a just and enduring prosperity among the nations...
...Forests are unexploited...
...Often their offerings are inappropriate to the needs...
...It also founded, or expanded, technical schools in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Libia, Malta, Morocco, Pakistan, Trinidad, Tobago, Turkey, Laos, Lebanon, and India...
...Last year, UNESCO opened a dozen teacher-training institutes in tropical Africa alone...
...France, which provides more foreign aid than any other nation in proportion to income, funnels only fifteen per cent of that aid through the United Nations...
...This year, UNDP's budget will come to about $150,000,000—again, far too little for the job to be done...
...A generation, at the very least, would be required to build this reserve...
...The outlook is anything but reassuring...
...Secretary General U Thant has warned, "The misery of much of the developing world is a progressive misery...
...Launched now, a World Marshall Plan just might, and I stress the word might, make life on this planet livable and meaningful by the year 2000...
...Vietnam should by right be only a sideshow in the macabre carnival of squalor, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and hopelessness which now afflict the inhabitants of two-thirds of our planet...
...pressure for a greater voice in the allocation of the world's wealth is mounting among "have nots...
...FAO in 1960 launched a stop-gap Freedom from Hunger crusade which has distributed $221 million in emergency food supplies...
...that their share of world exports has dipped from one-third of the total in 1950 to one-fifth in 1962—while the debts of thirty-seven emerging nations soared from $7 billion in 1955 to $18 billion in 1962, and their interest payments increased fourfold...
...Among "have not" countries—a list that includes most nations outside Europe, the Soviet Union, Australia, the United States, and Canada—crop yields are not keeping pace with population increase...
...West Germans are helping Colombians build food processing plants...
...UNESCO, the U.N...
...Men are poor and go hungry while fields and pastures, lakes and oceans, could feed them well...
...President Johnson, in revealing an expanded U.S...
...President Johnson last June told the United Nations, "Together [let us] raise the goal for technical aid and investment through the United Nations...
...Most "have nots," plagued by debt, poverty, trade disadvantage, staggering social ills, widespread sickness, and illiteracy, managed to advance their national growth rate by just two or three per cent a year...
...The world is rich in under-utilized resources...
...One project, an aerial mapping survey, revealed to the Mexican government that the nation's timber stands are larger than those of Sweden, thus opening the door to a greatly expanded industry...
...Today, Ceylon exports fish...
...I think," said U Thant, "this division of the world into rich and poor is much more real and much more serious, and ultimately more explosive, than the division of the world on ideological grounds...
...Yet his recent food and health plans will bear the Uncle Sam label...
...auspices...
...FAO sees no solution to this problem except through programs that include widespread family planning...
...It threatens to grow worse in the second half of the decade...
...The seriousness of this schism cannot be overstated...
...by the sharing of both affluent and emerging states in the decisionmaking process—and by a lack of funds needed to cope with the mounting global emergencies...
...and trained 20,000 health workers...
...While U Thant has called upon the industrialized states to assign one per cent of their national income to the anti-poverty battle, their response has been unimpressive and dishearteningly unilateral...
...But, says Dr...
...The absence of accurate information from China, which contains a fourth of the world's people, precludes more precise data...
...On land, FAO is showing farmers how to bring more acreage under cultivation (Chad) ; improving storage and road facilities to reduce crop spoilage (Mexico...
...Hoffman's 2,500 staff experts have opened 223 training schools, undertaken 254 pre-investment surveys, and financed 127 applied research laboratories...
...a World Marshall Plan coordinated by the United Nations—which has already established the basic machinery for the task—appears to have any chance to spare succeeding generations a fate of poverty, misery, and despair...
...If not, the crises of food and water shortages, pollution, epidemic, famine, overpopulation, illiteracy, and despair are liable to overwhelm that fragile veneer we call civilization...
...Thus, even though the world's farmers reported record harvests in 1964, their gains were erased by a population explosion which that year alone added sixty-three million new mouths to feed...
...Czechoslovakia with Peru...
...food export program, pointed out that "the problem of world hunger is more serious today than ever before...
...Some 2,000 additional motors are en route to nine other countries...
...Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, must struggle with even less than WHO's limited funds...
...UNICEF, the Children's Fund, despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize stipend last year, did not enjoy a good year financially...
...Tonight, every second human being will go to bed hungry...
...Still other U.N...
...yardstick...
...and from behind thick glass portals network cameras grind incessantly, capturing the heated clashes of headline-making personalities...
...Yet a huge program, by today's standards, would still look modest in contrast to the $120 billion the world spends each year on arms...
...Development Program (UNDP...
...helped fifty-seven countries improve their water supply...
...So will be unemployment and illiteracy...
...This agency has lifted the specter of malaria from the lives of more than 800 million human beings—although a like number still dwell in its shadow...
...We sell where we can for whatever price we can get on a particular day...
...On present showing, the numbers of unemployed men and women suffering from hunger and malnutrition will be markedly greater in 1970 than today...
...In most countries, the sight of infants and children with bellies bloated grotesquely from protein deficiency is common...
...Valuable mineral deposits lie untouched beneath their feet...
...Even so, a World Marshall Plan will by no means be as easy of execution as its much more limited predecessor which revived Europe's economy after World War II...
...Over the years, its officials have examined 90,-000,000 people for yaws (curing 35,-000,000 positive cases) and injected anti-tuberculosis vaccine into 170,000,-000 children...
...Hence, FAO is stressing long-range planning, including a master blueprint for agricultural growth...
...In some lands, it has wrought miracles that echo the Biblical story of the loaves and fishes...
...Much the same might be said of three other development agencies, the World Bank and its subsidiary International Finance Corporation (IFC), and International Development Association (IDA...
...At the airport, I toured hangars and workshops where hundreds of technicians are being trained for Latin America's skills-short commercial aviation industry...
...Yet India's food resources are so inadequate that the loss of much of last year's crop is resulting in a famine disaster unparalleled in this century...
...In dollar terms, our rate of investment abroad through international agencies is still but a fraction of that sought by U Thant, and even the total sum of all foreign aid and investment combined does not approach the Secretary General's goal of one per cent of national income...
...With a staff of only 800 in its Geneva headquarters and only 2,000 doctors and nurses in the field, WHO has made an indelible imprint upon the lives of millions...
...agency, is sponsoring more than 600 educational, technical, and research projects at a cost of $1 billion over a six-year period...
...Last summer, I viewed two of these, both in Mexico City...
...Currently, Swedish forestry experts are aiding Ceylon's timber developers...
...FAO experts provided 200 outboard motors, and demonstrated how yields could be increased tenfold...
...The agencies fall into three groupings...
...enabled thirty-seven others to fight tuberculosis...
...Shortly, these schools will be graduating 1,800 teachers a year...
...In promoting mutual aid among nations, the record of the United Nations is unmatched in all the annals of human cooperation...
...The plight of the 'have not' lands is an unnecessary economic and human tragedy," wrote Paul Hoffman, former head of the Special Fund, an agency merged this year with the Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA) into the U.N...
...Tragically, the Cold War has obscured the avalanche of disasters which has begun to engulf our times...
...Writing in the UNESCO Courier, U Thant has observed that two-thirds of the world's population shares but one-sixth of its income...
...Against this backdrop of economic deterioration, foreign aid outlays by the affluent powers have proved woefully inadequate...
...Such pre-investment surveys, where undertaken, have inspired $30 in private development funds for every dollar of cost, Hoffman says...
...UNESCO's story, though, offers much encouragement...
...Under a World Marshall Plan administered by the United Nations, the poor would have a say in where the funds go, assuming the developed governments can lay aside their aid-and-alms approach for a no-strings-attached concept, and assuming the industrialized nations will meet U Thant's request for allocating one per cent of national income to an international anti-poverty program...
...IDA has floated more than $1 billion in long-term interest-free loans, and IFC has invested $150 million in private enterprise projects...
...Each day, UNICEF officials dispense vitamin pills to 1,000,000 children...
...The ultimate answers, FAO says, must involve land reform, conquest of energy-sapping diseases of men and animals, pest control, massive dam and irrigation projects, population control, health and nutrition education, and more of everything vital to farming—seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanized equipment, instructors and instruction...
...And third, those essential to everyday communications such as the Universal Postal Union (UPU) or the World Meteorological Organization (WMO...
...The gap between the standards of living of the nations is widening...
...Their cry: "We are being displaced from international trade...
...Most important of all, precious human talents and energies are wasted...
...But because of the religious and cultural delicacies surrounding birth control practices, United Nations agencies have been restricted to research only, and it was not until last year that WHO began even that...
...The United Nations has solid expertise in this field...
...Secretary General U Thant estimates that at least one billion of us will make our beds in streets, alleys, or slums...
...If ECSOC gets scant publicity, its activities in the United Nations and the specialized agencies nevertheless account for ninety per cent of all U.N...
...And surely the social unrest and revolutionary tides triggered by this squalor will not long be confined to the depressed areas— particularly given the uncanny knack of the rival ideologues of the great world powers to transform all local unrest into a bloodier, East-West confrontation...
...At issue were the demands of the developing states for a larger share of world trade, preferential trade arrangements, a three per cent interest ceiling on loans, and lower trade barriers...
...All are characterized by administrations that effectively insulate them largely, if not wholly, from political storms...
...Defeated were the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britian, and most other leading powers...
...Life for these millions is a meaningless, unspeakable daily indignity characterized by disease, hunger, and hopelessness...
...Even should a World Marshall Plan take fifty or one hundred years to carry out...
...Their accomplishments are too intricate and too vast to enumerate here...
...Only a vast international undertaking, SHERWOOD ROSS is a Washington radio commentator who has covered many of the recent developments at the United Nations...
...And the overall toll, adults included, may well exceed 15,000,000...
...Spokesmen for the depressed countries asserted they could make no real gains against poverty in the present world market...
...These are cosmic figures...
...Roger Revelle, director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, told the House Committee on Agriculture recently that "it is almost certain that tens of millions of people will starve" in India this year, and that "it may be too late for us and the other rich countries to help very much," because of lack of facilities for distributing relief supplies rapidly...
...Its 117 member-governments together contribute only $25,000,000 a year...
...UNCTAD was created two years ago at the insistence of the "have nots" over the objections of the "haves...
...Our development plans are reduced to absurdity by market changes...
...These agencies have just not been able to meet the investment needs of the emerging states...
...5,000,000 more from tainted water...
...Upstairs, in the Security Council, where the Fedorenko-Goldberg variations are played to packed galleries, the murals are impressive...
...It is thus, and in no other way," the Pope stated, "that peace can be built up...
...By 1971, India's jobless will have risen to 14,000,000—an increase of 8,-000,000 over 1955...
...the rest from controllable communicable diseases...
...and Canadian bins, could feed the world's population for just sixty days...
...agencies...
...He asserts, "It is urgent for them to cut down some of the biggest items of waste— excessive military expenditures, prestige projects, inefficient administration, overstaffing of railways and other public enterprises, and subsidies to public services that should and could be self-supporting...
...Scientific knowledge is but little applied...
...The quality of human experience on this planet for countless hundreds of millions is appallingly subhuman...
...This killer, WHO officials estimate, could be eradicated from the globe if mankind would only make available an additional $31,000,000 for vaccine...
...18,000,000 from yaws...
...Hans Pederson, FAO's dairy chief, "a new major milk plant must be built every fourteen days to keep up with growing world population demands...
...On the occasion I first descended into ECSOC's conference hall, located in Sub-Basement Number One in the U.N.'s East River headquarters, I found myself to be the only spectator in the auditorium, barren of even a mural memorializing mankind...
...Now officials claim they have reached the halfway mark, an impressive achievement...
...Can the affluent powers, which pride themselves on being "civilized" and "scientifically advanced," continue such voracious luxuries as the arms race and the moon race when 15,000,-000 human beings are dying each year from disasters which are entirely preventable...
...Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) requires at least a brief look since it dramatically reflects what may be a growing rift between the older industrial nations and those newly emerging...
...As matters stand, WHO is obliged to spread its annual budget of $45,-000,000 thinly over 850 projects...
...Development Program and the World Bank...
...Under Hoffman, the Special Fund, by far the largest single U.N...
...Dutch hydrologists are mapping water resources in Sudan...
...By then, predicts B. R. Sen, FAO's director-general, famine will be chronic the continent over...
...Near Bombay, FAO helped open thirty dairies employing 5,000 workers to meet half the milk needs of the city's 3,000,000 residents...
...Yet UNICEF could reach only 60,000,000 of them in eighty-five countries last year...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
