[LC]

This discussion group on Science and the National
Interest has considered the implications for the conduct of U. S.
foreign policy -- and for the concept of the national interest it-
self -- of the contemporary revolution in the technology of war.
We turn now to examine what we should all prefer to believe is the
obverse of the same coin. Our task is to consider the implications
for national policy of the constructive potential of science and
technology, especially with respect to the economic development
of those regions and peoples not yet embraced in industrial civi-
lization.

World War II, regarded as an enterprise in the popular-
ization of science, must be counted a success. Well-fed, well-
clad troops deploying from lavishly supplied bases, especially

2.

[LC]

American, convinced the denizens of remote and backward places that change is at hand in the condition of man. The "war aim" of Freedom from Want articulated the expectations of hundreds of millions of people drawn suddenly into the 20th century. For them as for the people of the industrial countries, the war and the bomb that ended it gave a kind of inverted proof of the limitless capacity of science and technology to answer human need. Economic development was established as a primary concern of the United Nations, charged to its numerous technical agencies and to the Economic and Social Council and to the Trusteeship Council that fill boxes on the organization chart co-ordinate with that of the Security Council.

Speaking in 1960 to a conference of representatives from 40 developing countries, Abba Eban eloquently evoked the spirit of the original U. N. undertakings: "There is no law of nature confining scientific and technological progress to the developed nations of the West. New nations do not have to tread long and tormented paths. They can skip the turbulent phases

[LC]

3.

through which the Western industrial revolutions had to pass.

Nor is there any need to pay the price in human suffering which
Western man had to undergo in his odyssey across the centuries.

For we live in a world of sharpened social consciousness. New
states are more fortunate than were the older industrial countries,
in that they have at their disposal both the promise of twentieth-
century science -- and the conscience of twentieth-century society."

The U. S. has contributed generously to the framing of
these aims and institutions. Going beyond the traditional renun-
ciation of territorial ambition, the last five U. S. administra-
tions have declared the national interest to be a world at peace
and free of want in which the dignity of the human estate is open
equally to all men. Throughout this period, U. S. policy abroad
has insistently advanced its model of the world community, a
community of market economies that achieve growth, prosperity and
natural harmony of interest through freedom of enterprise and
trade. Moreover, the U. S. government reckons it has laid out
$60 billion (excluding military grants) in economic assistance
to other nations over the past 20 years.

4.

[LC]

About the first $30 billion or so, laid out in the first 10 years, there is general satisfaction. These funds went principally to restore the industrial economies of Western Europe. The second $30 billion has gone to support the development of pre-industrial economies. These outlays have been made with declining enthusiasm and against increasing domestic opposition. Their beneficiaries appear to be in worse trouble than before, and the U. S. seems to have fewer friends than ever.

In fact, the gap between the industrial and the pre-industrial nations has been widening and deepening. Their ways of life are so divergent that food production and consumption provide almost the only indexes by which they can be compared. The disparity before the war is expressed by figures showing that the industrial nations, with 33 per cent of the world population, produced nearly 60 per cent of the food. In the intervening years, food production has been pushed upward by 50 per cent on both sides of the gap. But the population of the industrial countries has grown by only 21 per cent, while that of the pre-industrial countries has grown by 52 per cent. Since the peoples

5.

of the industrial countries were already adequately supplied on
the calorie scale, they have converted a large part of the 30 per
cent increase in their food supply per capita into protein. The
peoples of the pre-industrial countries have maintained their in-
adequate calorie intake by increasing the protein deficit in their
diets. This is the background for responsible estimates that two-
thirds of these peoples, or roughly half of the world population,
suffer malnutrition.

The improvement in nutrition scarcely shows up in the
economic indexes of the industrial countries. Agriculture con-
stitutes less than 5 per cent of the gross national product of the
U. S. even as it yields surpluses for shipment overseas. The pro-
duction of the entire bill of goods now generates less than half
of the gross national product. As much as 20 to 25 per cent of
the tangible product is presently devoted to capital investment,
to arms, to ventures in space and to economic assistance without
detectable subtraction from the continuous increase in current con-
sumption and with an appreciable portion of the plant and the labor
force standing idle. More than half of the labor force is employed
as providers of services and nearly half of these in not-for-

[LC]

6.

profit activities undertaken in the public interest. The mechaniza-
tion of production is carrying the peoples of the other industrial
countries in the same direction away from the historic common lot
of mankind. It is true, they find new kinds of hazard and discomfort
in cities where more than half of them now live, but presumably they
will manage these by the exercise of good will and a little of the
ingenuity that placed them in this man-made environment.

In the pre-industrial countries, agriculture engages 70
per cent or more of the population and produces from 35 to 50 per
cent of the gross national product. Output responds sensitively
to demand for bulk commodities from the world market (i.e. the in-
dustrial countries) but yields slowly to demand for subsistence
from the increasing populations. The gain in food production has
been won by bringing poorer land under cultivation and hence with
serious damage to resources as well as reduction of the tradition-
ally low yield per man hour. Scarcity and underemployment on the
land have made the cities of these countries the centers of a
world-wide population "implosion", crowding uncounted millions of
people into squatter communities on their perimeters. The cities

[LC]

7.

may otherwise be regarded as enclaves of the industrial economies
to which the countries' exports go; they depend upon imports not
only for hard and soft goods but for fuel and even for food. Ex-
cept where oil and mineral exports bring in large and steady earn-
ings, the foreign exchange balances of all of the pre-industrial
countries are negative. Out of some 90 pre-industrial countries
in Asia, Africa and Latin America, some 30 are under government by
military junta.

Subject to qualification, amendment and exception from
case to case, this is the gap between the industrial and pre-
industrial, the rich and the poor countries that make up the divided
world community west of the Urals and south of the Himalayas. Main-
land China has been excluded because it is effectively excluded from
that community. China is a pre-industrial country engaged in in-
dustrial revolution. It is proceeding to the task in historically
validated style. The traditional deprivation of the peasantry and
the urban poor in the distribution of the country's insufficient
product has been sharpened by harsh measures of coercion to in-
crease the rate of savings. Investment absorbing 30 per cent and

[LC]

8.

more of current production has now secured large objectives in heavy industry, transport, energy and watershed management. Sober and informed observers declare that the population is no longer exposed to the risk of famine. Within 25 years, it is estimated, China will be a first-class industrial power.

China is excluded also because the purpose of this discussion is to explore the question whether the industrial revolutions that impend in Asia, Africa and Latin America must follow the precedent of the Chinese, the Russian and the earlier classical industrial revolutions or whether a different route can be opened up. The possibility to be considered here is that economic and technical assistance from the industrial nations might moderate the coercion which otherwise, in conditions of scarcity, appears necessary to the process of capital formation. Industrialization by one route or another offers the only escape from the Malthusian blind alley into which the pre-industrial nations have been pushed. Especially in Asia and Latin America, their population growth has outrun the capacity of the resources accessible to primitive agricultural technologies. The so-called population explosion ought to be regarded as a first consequence of their acculturation to in-

[LC]

9.

dustrial civilization. It reflects a sharp drop in maternal and infant death rates, and it motivates a readiness for change.

Industrialization is necessary to push the increase of food production ahead of population growth. The vision is not, however, the tractor and combine. The labor-intensive methods that produce such a high yield per acre -- 5500 original calories per day in East Asia compared to 2500 in the U. S. -- can be improved by new implements and power tools but cannot be readily mechanized. What is needed to increase food output is water, to begin with. In the arid and monsoon countries, regulated and dependable water supplies can make two and three crops a year possible where a single crop is now a gamble. Synthetic fertilizers are essential to maintaining productivity in the nitrogen-poor soils of these regions; pesticides are necessary to secure the gain for human consumption. Facilities for storage, processing and transportation must be provided to deliver the food, especially the more perishable protein foods, to the increasing percentage of the population that is migrating from village to town. All of this implies the installation of the complete apparatus of an industrial system with all of its interdependent working parts.

10.

At the present rate of population growth in Asia and Latin America it will take a 50 per cent increase in food production over the next 15 years just to maintain the present inadequate nutrition. If the rate of population growth is to be reduced, demographers agree, the rate of increase in production must be pushed ahead sufficiently to bring an increase in output per capita. New techniques of fertility control appear to be effective at lower levels of motivation. But a minimum subjectively appreciable increase in individual well-being is required. The world population is scheduled to double by the end of the century. The next doubling after that will bring it to 12 billion people. Authorities as diverse in their outlook as J. D. Bernal, Colin Clark and Harrison Brown agree that the world's resources worked by known technologies can sustain a still larger population. But the human species must eventually bring its numbers into stable adjustment with its environment. If there is some optimum, the chance of arriving at it will be improved the sooner production overtakes populations. But production cannot even keep up with population growth in Asia and Latin America over the next 15 years without a substantial start on the task of industrialization.

[d]

11.

Development efforts on the scale plainly indicated here
were projected with greater confidence around 1950, when the U. N.
technical agencies were first putting world statistics together.
With the population estimated to be increasing at 1.2 per cent from
a base of 2.5 billion, it was reckoned that $500 billion invested
over a 35-year period would bring a 50 per cent improvement in
individual nutrition and an overall one per cent per annum increase
in income per capita. By the end of that period a third of the
rural population would have moved into occupations off the land; the
population increase would be reduced to one per cent and the further
growth of the industrial economies would be self-sustaining.
The industrial countries were to supply 40 per cent of the capital
input. At the rate of $6 billion per year this was not an unreasonable expectation.

Today similar calculations would have to start from a
bigger population base and reckon with a higher rate of growth.
But even if all the magnitudes had to be doubled, the numbers would
remain relatively finite. The flow of long-term funds from the in-
dustrial to the pre-industrial countries is running at the rate of
$6 billion a year. A substantial percentage of this is in food and

12.

similar relief shipments that do not contribute directly to in-
crease in productive capacity at their destinations. But economies
that can sink $120 billion a year in arms could easily manage much
larger inputs of capital.

It is now understood, however, that technocratic calcula-
tions of this kind do not exhaust the complexities of "foreign aid".
A large body of literature has accumulated, and development has be-
come a sub-discipline of economics. Among other conclusions, stud-
ies have shown that the pre-industrial countries cannot absorb cap-
ital at a rate significantly higher than the present. Authorities
cite the absence of stable political leadership, the shortage of
entrepreneurial, managerial and technical talent, the lack of
skilled labor and the universal illiteracy of the unskilled man-
power that is so redundantly available. To discourse of this kind,
representatives of the pre-industrial countries have answers; for
example, Alex Quaison-Sackey before the U. N. Assembly: "Many
bogus sociological arguments are put forward to justify the flow of
economic assistance at its present paltry levels. Our country, in
fact, would have fruitfully employed capital at many times the rate
available. In proceeding on our own, as in the construction of the

13.

new port of Tema, we have had to ask great sacrifices of our people
and yet reduce our programs below the scale and capacity we know
will be required by our economy 10 years hence." The fact that
Nkrumah is now out of power does not vitiate his ambassador's
thesis. Perhaps this is the principal gain of the past 20 years:
colonies have become nations with sovereign interests and spokes-
men to assert them.

Distinguished spokesmen for both sides are to be found
on the ECOSOC advisory committee on the application of science and
technology to development. They agree "that the most critical
limitation on the capacity of a country to absorb and apply or
adapt science and technology to development is its supply of
trained manpower." The program they urge cuts between the colonial
system that trained up a small elite of civil servants from the
native populations and the mass literacy campaigns of revolution-
ary romance. They call for "increasing the size and balanced
composition of the cadres of scientific and technical manpower."
This means the creation of schools and specially designed curricula
at the secondary and junior college levels. The graduates will
meet the need for technicians, draughtsmen and other middle skills

14.

and from their numbers will come the talent capable of further
training. Judging by the impact of reforms in the high school
science curricula of the United States, instituted by university
professors less than a decade ago, such effort can pay off richly
within finite periods of time. The textbooks and teaching ma-
terials from these programs are already percolating into the
schools in pre-industrial countries.

Of all the tasks in development, this is the one that
most explicitly requires external assistance. It is also a con-
tribution that can be made without cost in the sense that the
stock of knowledge is not diminished by the sharing of it. The
effort, however, takes time and, more poignantly, the lifetimes
of rare and devoted individuals. Experience shows that the teacher
must go to the students. Despite barriers against immigration
everywhere in the world, students who go abroad from poor coun-
tries for their training too often fail to return home.

The model for all enterprises in the transfer of
knowledge remains the work of the Rockefeller Foundation in up-
grading the agriculture of Mexico and other Latin American coun-
tries. In Mexico the foundation established a laboratory and

[LC]

15.

experiment stations that served at once to breed optimum strains of the potato, corn and wheat plants and to train the full range of personnel, from research agronomists to extension agents, needed to carry these genetic inventions to the farmers. After two decades, with the increase in food production rising to 10 per cent per year, Mexico has joined the company of food-exporting economies and the improvement in nutrition is showing up in the population's life tables. The program is self-sustaining under the management of its own alumni, and one of them has served as Secretary of Agriculture in the Federal Government of Mexico. It serves also to demonstrate that techniques which are the product of generations of accomplishment in the history of science can now give momentously effective application within a human lifetime.

Service of this kind naturally holds deep attraction for members of the university community in the U. S. and other industrial countries. American foundations that have sponsored such enterprises have found it necessary, however, to create a kind of civilian foreign service, with professional personnel committed to careers. A leave of absence of a year or two from a university appointment does not give enough time for useful ad-

16.

justment and performance in the strange environment of a poor
country; five years make too large a break in responsibility and
advancement at home.

New scales of value and institutional arrangements are
required to bring the intellectual resources of the industrial
countries into effective connection to the tasks of economic de-
velopment. One potentially replicable model is provided by the
counterpart associations established, with the sponsorship of the
Ford Foundation, between universities in the U. S. and in India.
The University of Missouri and the agricultural research and
training institute at Bhubaneswar, the consortium of engineering
schools headed up by Purdue and the technical institute at Kanpur,
and the Harvard Business School and a new school of business admin-
istration at Ahmedabad exchange faculty and students and conduct
joint research enterprises under arrangements that promote con-
tinuity of careers and achievement for individuals on both sides.
Whatever the econometrists are able to quantify about the value of
these ventures, there is no doubt that they yield the highest re-
turn per dollar of all forms of economic assistance.

17.

Something like the same leverage attaches to investment in the next phase in the application of science and technology to development. This is the surveying and primary engineering of resource development. What required more than a century -- from Lewis and Clark to the complete 10-foot contour interval, 1:24,000 geodetic survey map -- to accomplish for the United States, can now be scheduled in months for a pre-industrial country with aerial photography and prospecting. Under financial sponsorship of the U. N. Special Fund, for example, the system analysis for the management of the Mekong watershed is now virtually complete. Sites for the principal dams have been selected and even drilled; and the major distribution works have been laid out to accord with the logic of a soil inventory and land use map. The input in this case of engineering valued at $14 million has set the stage for investment that will eventually total $7 billion. The enterprise is notable also because it has engaged the talent and the national treasures of 18 countries, including India and Japan, as well as the U. S. and the United Kingdom. Elsewhere in the pre-industrial countries there are 29 watersheds of comparable square-mileage awaiting similar preparation. Meanwhile the rains that clear the

18.

[lc]

Western Ghats facing the Arabian Sea run down the Godavari River to flood out villages on the Bay of Bengal.

In the arid lands of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula, engineering enterprises sponsored by the U. N. Food and Agriculture Organization have opened up the fossil waters of the Pleistocene for use on lands that were abandoned by farmers at the fall of Carthage. The Intercalary aquifers of the Sahara hold potentially greater wealth than the oil reserves discovered there in the past 15 years. Exploitation of this resource demands the cooperation of the 10 nations whose territories it underlies; for the underground flows of the waters, now traced out and mapped, ignore the political boundaries and are likely to prove highly sensitive to the rate of withdrawal at strategic points. It has been suggested that the energy needed for pumping be contributed by the industrial nations that have staked claims to the oil reserves. Water sources of a similar geological vintage have been opened up in Greece and in Lebanon, and the mapping of the fossil waters of the Arabian peninsula is underway. For all of these lands there is in prospect a revival of the agricultural productivity that made the Fertile Crescent the cradle of

19.

urban civilization and sustained the four millennia of Classical
civilization.

Recently, aerial photography added 40 million acres to the forest reserves of Mexico. In Chile, the aerial gravimeter and magnetometer located what has proved to be a 10 billion ton body of 60 per cent iron ore and in another South American country, what promises to be a comparable deposit of copper and related non-ferrous ores. These are examples at once of man's ignorance of the resources of large reaches of the earth and of the vital role that the "lead time" inputs of science and technology have to play in the planning of economic development. Considering the objectives and possibilities that knowledge of this kind can open up to national plans, the work ought to be pressed everywhere on a larger scale.

The exploitation of such resources requires large investments in applied research and pilot plant. Because the time course and results cannot be set in advance, it is urgent that work of this kind be carried forward aggressively in order to trigger off the next phase of development at the earliest date.

[lc]

20.

The iron ore reserves of Chile lie far from any coal beds; so do comparable ore bodies in Venezuela and in West Africa. Along with large ore reserves Brazil and India possess substantial beds of low grade coal. These ores are moving into world commerce and the blast furnaces of industrial nations. If they are to provide the substance of domestic steel industries research will have to be conducted into methods of direct reduction and, in the case of India and Brazil, the beneficiation of coals laid down before the Ice Age before last.

In the steel industries of the industrial countries, amply supplied with reserves (diminishing) of coking coal, there is no disposition to enquire into these possibilities. The pre-industrial countries lack the command of steel technology that must surround such research. Here is an assignment for an international laboratory. The work should not be postponed until the industrial countries run out of coking coal. The pre-industrial countries possess many other mineral resources peculiar to the geology of the broken continent of Gondwanaland; the technology for exploiting them is either nonexistent or it is a proprietary asset of some industrial nation.

[Lc]

21.

It has been easier to enlist the sponsorship of industrial countries for research in agricultural technology. The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, along with the Indian research station at Cuttack, has successfully crossed the high-yielding *Japonica* with the *Indica* strains native to South Asia and produced many successful varieties of the cross adapted to the diversity of niches in the agriculture of this vast region. In the arid-land countries around the Mediterranean, FAO has sponsored the development of crop-plant strains that thrive in saline soils and brackish irrigation waters. Another enterprise involving collaboration of Israeli and Arab scientists has established a technology for suppressing outbreaks of the desert locust.

There is need for research enterprise on a larger scale and at more fundamental levels to deal with questions of agriculture in the arid-land and monsoon countries that are too big for their national laboratories. Sentiment is growing in favor of the organization of one or more regional institutes. Prediction and potentially control of monsoon storms, management of the fragile laterite soils, an uncatalogued bestiary of micro-

[Lc]

22.

organisms infecting plants and animals -- these are some of the
tasks on the agenda. Here it should be emphasized that many of
the most significant developments in tropical agriculture have
come by horizontal interaction among technologists of the pre-
industrial countries rather than bestowal from industrial countries.

The annual money flows financing the transfer of
knowledge in support of economic development -- counting bi-lateral
as well as multi-lateral and U. N. activities and including such
major engineering ventures as the Mekong Valley program -- do not
exceed $500 million. These outlays take effect, however, through
big multipliers. As of January 1966, the U. N. Special Fund had
committed a cumulative total of $583 million from its own funds
to 604 projects (to which the beneficiary countries were com-
mitted for an additional $823 million). Out of 73 completed
projects, 25 projects representing Special Fund investment of
$32 million had generated follow-on investment totalling $1,068
million. That is 30 times the lead-time investment! At half
this rate, the Special Fund projects represent a potential $10
billion worth of development. If the rate of investment in
development is to overtake the expansion of human need, the lead-

[LC]

23.

time outlays on science and technology ought to increase by at least one order of magnitude. If the pre-industrial countries cannot now absorb technical assistance at this rate, the first increases in the rate of investment should go to improve their absorptive capacity. The financial requirement, of course, serves only as an index of the mobilization of people and institutions required. Translated into these terms, the effort can be visualized as scaling out at the size of the U. S. space program. If it could be mounted now, its payoff would come in time to begin to meet the needs of a world population 50 per cent larger than today.

The heavier and more visible capital inputs to economic development -- such as dams, fertilizer plants and steel mills -- may also be regarded as a mode of information transfer. The principal contribution required of the industrial country is engineering, whether embodied in blueprints or in the shell plates of a blast furnace. Although the multiplier is not as big at this stage, such investment catalyzes large capital outlays, principally in the form of labor, by the recipient economy.

24.

Big programs have become unfashionable in the litera-
ture of development, as representing monuments to local leader-
ship rather than effective amplifiers of productivity. But in
water management the little works in the valleys cannot function
until the big dams are built at the headwaters. A similar argu-
ment supports the thesis that industrial development should pro-
ceed from the most primary plant that local resources can sustain.
P. C. Mahalanobis has calculated that a single unit of foreign ex-
change invested in the Indian steel industry can generate the
value of 75 units of foreign exchange per annum thereafter in
food grains. Even if India becomes for a while an exporter of
semi-finished steel from capacity installed ahead of increase in
local demand, as seems likely, the value added will contribute
considerably more to relief of the country's critical foreign ex-
change problem than the export of the country's ores. The same
logic justifies the aluminum ingot plant that will soak up the
first power generated by the Volta dam in Ghana; the country will be
exporting bauxite transformed by kilowatts and will earn foreign
exchange on both commodities.

25.

[lc]

The cost of this kind of aid to the industrial
economies is misrepresented by the figure that states it in the
national budget. In U. S. experience, 80 cents out of each
foreign aid dollar has been spent at home. Such expenditure
gives the same immediate stimulus to the system as an expenditure
on arms or space and with greater prospect of eventual economic
return.

The hordes of underemployed people in the countryside
and of the plainly unemployed in the squatter cities have en-
couraged the idea that development programs should call in labor-
intensive technologies. A strong case can be made for the
opposite strategy. In the first place, there is a generation or
two of labor-intensive work to be done in every pre-industrial
country on the infrastructure of ports, rails, highways, hous-
ing and buildings. When it comes to the productive apparatus,
the argument goes, this ought to incorporate the most advanced
developments in science and technology. The model is the petro-
chemical plant, with two operators at a control panel. Tech-
nology at this stage of perfection is highly portable, easily
installed, makes least demand on local human resources and op-

[Lc]

26.

erates at the same efficiency independent of local conditions whether in Galveston or Kuwait. In sum there is no reason why, with adequate capital and technical assistance from outside, the prospective new steel industry in Chile should have to evolve through the bee-hive coke oven and backyard blast-furnace phase. Ideally, it should install continuous casting at the outset.

The application of science and technology to development may, therefore, offset and reverse the forces that tend to widen and deepen the gap between the rich and the poor. Over the past 20 years the world economy has shown no tendency to approach the natural harmony of its classical model. The pre-industrial nations, in their mirror-image relationship to the industrial nations, have found themselves paying higher prices for their imports out of earnings from exports sold at almost constantly declining prices. The international capital market has recorded massive flows horizontally from one industrial country to another and upstream from the pre-industrial to industrial countries, but almost none downstream to the pre-industrial countries except for investment in extraction of mineral resources. The only counter

[Lc]

27.

to these forces has been the flow of economic assistance from government to government in support of development programs and for prevention or relief of famine.

Industrialization, by definition, must revise the relationships now prevailing between the rich and poor countries. As a developing economy increases the volume and variety of its output, it seeks to substitute goods of its own manufacture for imports and to reduce the relative importance of foreign trade in its expanding total economic activity. This means rigid control over foreign exchange with the aim of diverting export earnings from consumer to capital goods, tariff barriers to protect infant industries and a variety of other discriminatory practices. In the long run, of course, the developing country will emerge as a bigger and more valued trading partner; by far the largest percentage of the world's commerce flows among the industrial countries. But in the interim the industrial country that provides technical and capital assistance would seem to be acting against its own interest -- turning customers into competitors and raising the cost of the commodities it imports from them. Consid-

[LC]

28.

Operations of this kind naturally militate against the flow of aid.

In the U. S. the expansion of foreign aid effort is further hampered by ideology. There being no private funds available for investment at capital-output ratios of 2.5 to 1 and higher, primary industries as well as transportation, communication and utility systems are being established in the public sector in developing countries. What is more, many of these enterprises are unprofitable and can be justified only by the saving of foreign exchange and the external economies they provide for satellite industries. All of this is repugnant to folk economics.

It is now possible to make a meaningful estimate of the capital requirement for development at a rate that will overtake population trends. As the target for the "decade of development" U. N. agencies set the attainment of a growth rate of 5 per cent in the economies of the pre-industrial countries. Discounted by population growth this would yield an increase in output per capita of 2 or 3 per cent. With the budgets and the foreign exchange transactions of these countries on record and

[LC]

29.

with reasonably solid data available for estimating their na-
tional accounts, the objective can be stated in dollars. As of
1960 the gross domestic product of these countries came to $170
billion; their current foreign exchange deficit was $4.9 billion.
By 1970, if the decade's objective could be attained, the gross
domestic product would grow to $280 billion, and the foreign ex-
change deficit would be running at $20 billion.

The deficit is the measure of the external capital
assistance required to fire-up the 5 per cent rate of growth.
It goes without saying that assistance will not be running at
that rate by 1970; the gross domestic product will fall well
short of $280 billion and the growth rate will not have reached
5 per cent. The need of the developing countries asks historic-
ally unprecedented acts of altruism by the industrial countries,
especially by the U. S. A world free of want can be attained,
however, within the lifetime of this generation. That is also
an entirely new thing in history. And it has been said to be
in the national interest.