Evening star., 1951-03-13
Point Four and Peace

Point FouF and Peace
In its unanimous report to the President the
international Development Advisory Board has
recommended that the United States in behalf
of it's own and the rest of the free worlds secur-
ity and prosperity, undertake vast, multi-bil-
ion-dollar enterprise to promote the economic
advance of backward areas in Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. In
effect, the enterprise-though involving much
smaller governmental outlay than the Marshall
Plan-would put the Point Four program to work
on scale many times greater than the one
made possible by the $34,5oOoOO already appro-
priated by Congress to improve the status of
underdeveloped regions.
Following much the same line of reasoning
as the Gray Report of last November, the board
headed by Nelson Rockefeller and made up of
representatives of agriculture labor business
and other national groups-has based its recon-
mendationS on the conviction that they are
essential Cd to meet the immediate threat of
Soviet military aggression and Subverson and
(2) to attain the long-range objective of an
enduring peace in which the free nations will
be able to prosper and feel secure. In the boards
words, because of the imperativeS implicit in this
double challenge, "The question confronting us
is not shall we help the underdeveloped areas?
The chain of interdependence is so inextricably
forged that we cannot avoid helping
BY way of illustration, the boards report
emphasizes that the areas involved send us more
than half of everything we receive from abroad
including 73 per cent of the strategic and criti-
cal raw materials that we must have to keep
our most vital industries going. In turn, these
areas get 81 per cent of their total imports from
the United States and 40 per cent from Western
Europe. Despite this exchange, however, and de-
spite the potentiaities of their natural resources
their economies have been so poorly organized
and developed that they are gravely afflicted,
by and large, with hunger, poverty, illiteracy
and disease-a condition inviting internal unrest
and exposing them to Soviet subversion aggres-
sion and conquest
Accordingly, to cope with the present Com
munist menace and to insure that the peoples
Of the underdeveloped countries will remain on
the side of the non-Soviet world in the long
term effort to build decent peace the Rookie
feller board has recommended that the United
States centralize all its major foreign economic
operations in powerful new agency with ex-
traordinary authority to coordinate aid and
developmental programs in close cooperation
with the Director of Defense Mobilization and
the Secretary Of State The agency-which would
absorb the Marshall Plan, among other projects
would receive about $500 million a year for
several years to put into effect systematic
cuUIG W 4upIOVc udISpOIId-
tion, public health, education, food production,
output of raw materials, etc.
But that would be only part OF. the picture.
In addition, in collaboration with the new
agency, the World Bank would administer two
international funds amounting to about 5000
million, of which some $3.50 million would be
contributed by the United States These funds
-repayable in considerable part-would be used
to finance certain types of essential public works
and make loans to n-governmental enterprise
In the underdeveloped countries Finally over
and above all this, since the main reliance would
be on private capital there would be tax incen-
tiveS and special guarantees against losses to
encourage American investors to step up their
investments in those countries from the present
81 billion to at least 81 billion.
1t need hardly be added that such program
is open to many questions, and if and when the
President presents something like it to Congress,
a sharp debate will certainly ensue. Nevertheless
whatever may be said against some of the de-
tails, the Rockefeller boards recommendations
can hardly be attacked on grounds of objective.
What they add up to is challenge to the United
States and the entire free world to promote
human betterment of kind that can greatly
brighten the outlook for a good and lasting
peace. If the problem is handled afirmatively,
with vigor and vision the results will be mutually
enrching in far more than just narrow eco
nomic sense. To ignore it would be simply to
ignore the meaning of both the short-range and
long-range Soviet threat