UN General Assembly
1971

127. Last year /1857th meeting] we pointed out that the first United Nations Development Decade, taken as a whole, had been a failure. Today we are particularly concerned with an emerging protectionist trend in certain developed countries, a trend which threatens to undo even the little progress achieved in the past few years. Such protectionist attitudes will undermine the very goals for which so many countries have labored. We, in developing countries, have worked hard to increase production and output by training manpower and providing capital. Just as our new products begin to find new markets, we are confronted by protectionist tariffs; This trend must be stopped and reversed, for its implications are ominous. We urge the developed countries to make a new commitment to development: to liberalize trade and to remove prohibitive tariffs, in particular, on goods from developing countries. 128. An important forum in which this new commitment might be undertaken is the forthcoming third session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD] scheduled to meet in the spring of next year in Santiago, Chile.