Programme for Mutual Assistance

As I am talking among friends, I hope that a certain candour on my part will not be misunderstood. It is in that spirit that I wish to share my thoughts on the principles which should govern the new world economic order, and a concrete programme for mutual assistance among the non-aligned nations.

In the re-structuring of the world economic order, we should promote all steps which would increase the capacity of every one of us to meet our basic needs. The new economic order, to which we are all committed, can have meaning and content only if it is beneficial to all of us and generates new impulses of growth in all the developing countries. Secondly, relief should be made available to countries suffering high costs as a result of the transition towards the new international economic order, eventually leading to reduction and then elimination of the nega­tive flow of resources from poor countries to rich countries.

The decisions we take in Lima will shape the course of the U.N.'s seventh special session in New York. We have a special responsibility to ensure that the session, called in response to the resolution of our Heads of State and Government adopted in Algiers in 1973, yields some meaningful results. It should be our earnest endeavour to determine how best we can join our forces to obtain from the seventh special session a renewed commit­ment to the programme of action and to negotiate the means and the modalities for putting it and the charter of economic rights and duties into effect. Some of the more important points which need urgent consideration are:

(i) Integrated programme for commodities, covering all pri­mary products exported by developing countries which could bring about a progressive improvement in their
prices.

(ii) Measures for establishment of a central fund to provide financial support for buffer stocks, market intervention and mechanism for improved compensatory financing scheme.

(iii) A special programme to augment food production and in­crease the share of developing countries in food process­ing and manufacturing industries.

(iv) Mechanism to adjust the volume and conditions of capi­tal flows to areas with development potential and capa­city which will put to work idle human skills and unuti­lised material resources of the developing world.

(v) Proper share in monetary management for representatives of developing countries who have financial resources and also of those whose need for it has become even greater.

Considering that developed countries as a whole have not yet accepted all the elements of the new international economic order, we have to devise means and mechanisms for mutual assistance in the light of these unexceptionable principles.