Permanent Body For Trade Talks

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30469, 17 June 1964, Page 17

Permanent Body For Trade Talks

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) GENEVA. June 16. The 120-nation world trade conference yesterday agreed on the establishment of a permanent United Nations Trade and Development Board, to consist of 55 members.

The new organisation to be elected by the conference will consist of 12 African countries, 10 Asian. 18 from Western Europe, the United States, the . Commonwealth and Japan, nine Latin American and six

Eastern European. Under compromise proposals, the conference would become a permanent organ of the United Nations General {Assembly, meeting at intervals of not less than three years, with a permanent executive committee meeting twice yearly. The most significant event !of the conference, from a oolitical viewpoint, - says the Geneva correspondent of “The Times,” has been the emergence of a group of 75 developing countries. Their solidarity has been impressive. It looks as if they will form a new and highly vocal bloc in world affairs, he continues.

Their coming together at the conference was dictated by a joint feeling of being economically underprivileged, but in practice, so many of them are competing to sell the same primary commodities, that their economic unity is deceptive. It is rather for political motives, in terms of exercising influences, that their affinity makes sense. The second political result of the conference has been the eclipse of Russia. The Russians have trod carefully, having so little to offer, but in spite of their support for an international trade organisation, they have failed to impress the developing countries.

A number of Russian Ideas have been taken up in the amalgam of the developing countries* economic philoso-phy-such as the importance of State trading, or the principle of limiting to 3 per cent the rate of Inter-Government loans.