Conferences

Basic needs A new ball game, but who will play? Tripartite World Conference on Employment, Income Distribution and Social

Progress and the International Division of Labour, Geneva, 478June, 7976.

Overshadowed by the more lavish pro- ductions of UNCTAD and Habitat, the World Employment Conference staged by the International Labour Office was still perhaps the most productive of this year’s UN spectaculars. And true to the tripartite structure of the ILO, this con- ference had the added piquancy of employers’ and workers’ delegations as well as governments: a real three-ring circus, with the thrill of watching the various factions perform daring verbal somersaults on the high wire, defying logic as much as gravity.

The posturing and persiflage oc- casioned by these global get-togethers make it hard to assess their real worth at close range, especially since much of their value, if any, is probably sub- liminal. At one level they may work, like the World Food Conference, as a catalyst for mobilising substantial new resources, or by making the case for a shift in development priorities; but more often than not they fail to establish the necessary links between principle and

practice. The ILO’s immediate achievement in

this conference was to have taken the concept of basic human needs, parcelled it into a fullscale development strategy and then sold it to the world com- munity. In theory, this should lead to a positive reorientation of international development planning, which might even prove a major accomplishment, but the connection between principles and reality for the time being looks decidedly tenuous.

Though bearing the overwhelming share of our world’s poverty and un- employment problems, the rural poor of the developing countries were neither present nor represented in Geneva. And while the IL0 had made clear enough in its ‘blue book’ for the conference’ that

’ ILO, Employment, growth and basic needs - a one-world problem, Geneva, 1976.

rural sector policies must be the cor- nerstone of a basic needs strategy, it was more by dint of their efforts than the enthusiasm of delegates that this was reflected in the final report. Dismal conclusions might indeed be drawn from the fact that, among various draft proposals submitted to the conference by the Employers’ Group, the Workers’ and the Group of 77 (developing coun- try) governments, only the first two gave so much as a nod in the direction of rural development.

The 77 paper had nothing whatever to say on this subject, contenting itself with an acknowledgment that land reform is a good thing ‘to the extent that each country feels it to be appropriate’. If the 77 can’t do better than that, they might at least spare their friends em- barrassment and say nothing.

Meanwhile, in another forlorn piece of clowning, the western governments and employers put on their false noses and gave a virtuoso display of semantic antics. Well, what can you do but laugh or cry when the final draft report, suggesting that the achievement of basic needs will often require an initial redistribution of assets including land, is reduced to nonsense by an amendment adding the words ‘with adequate and timely compensation’?

Devoting exactly four of its 120 paragraphs to rural sector policies, the final conference report offers a 100. word definition of integrated rural development . . . calls for more emphasis on the development of co-operatives for transportation, storage and marketing as well as land, equipment and credit . . . stresses again the importance of agrarian reform . . . and declares that the main thrust of a basic needs strategy must be to ensure effective mass par- ticipation of the rural population in the political process in order to safeguard their interests.

In the debates of the various working

groups there was little or no specific talk about the implications of the basic needs strategy for rural development or food production. Given the structure of the conference it would have been difficult to provide for this, with the employers and trade union delegates predominantly from the in- dustrial/commercial sector and govern- ment spokesmen from their respective Ministries of Labour. It did, however, introduce a slight air of unreality, further accentuated on the key topic of job creation - much more their own thing - when quite a few delegations took off for never-never land, insisting on full access to advanced technology regardless of basic needs criteria or how much investment per job their national budgets would allow.

The map of world unemployment drawn statistically by the IL0 in its blue book illustrates to what degree the con- ference underrated the priorities of rural development. Of the total labour force of 700 million in the developing market economy countries, nearly 300 million are unemployed or underemployed - and of those, 240 million are people in the rural areas. By the year 2000 this labour force is expected to double, with the population of the agricultural sector continuing to rise in absolute terms.

One of the most impressive documents to emerge from a UN agen- cy in recent times, the blue book does much to compensate for the short- comings of the conference itself with a thorough and well-integrated exegesis of rural development needs. It warns that to meet basic needs, rather than just the increases in effective demand which oc- cur without changes in income distribu- tion, will probably require increases in Third World food production even greater than are needed to achieve an average annual growth rate of 4%. As to agrarian reform, the IL0 notes that ‘sometimes political will has been suf- ficient to pass the necessary legislation but not to avoid the successful evasion of its provisions’. Elsewhere it has sometimes been carried out too hastily and with insufficient attention to pro- viding the necessary supporting services for the new farm operators.

Most countries have tended to neglect non-agricultural rural activities, the blue book points out. It identifies expansion and improvement of small-scale pro-

FOOD POLICY November 1976

Conferences

on the road; they are, rather, a warning of the mechanical faults and hijack threats likely to be encountered en route. Let’s hope by then the ACC will have stripped down to T-shirt and jeans and be ready to wield a hefty spanner.

cessing and manufacturing, plus greater investment in roads, storage facilities and rural housing as elements which are central to an integrated rural develop- ment strategy and to meeting the basic needs of the poor rural strata.

The scope for inter-agency action in this field was highlighted particularly by Mr A.L. Dawson of the World Food Programme in a speech to the con- ference. The WFP, he said, had a pro- ven capacity to prepare and help in ex- ecuting iabour-intensive projects in a wide range of fields such as those the IL0 was promoting under the World Employment Programme. His agency had already created direct employment for about six million workers and in- directly for many more. He proposed that resources other than food aid - for example construction materials, work tools and even cash to pay wages - could be mobiiised internationally to serve as inputs for WFP-supported employment projects.

In a wider context it is worth noting that the Administrative Committee on Co-ordination (ACC), which provides a high-level link between the UN specialised agencies, has recently accepted the desirability of a rural development strategy oriented against poverty - wholly in line, therefore, with the basic needs approach. From this it appears, according to Keith Griffin, chief of the ILO’s rural and urban employment policies branch, that the UN family is ‘poised to embark on an ambitious inter-agency planning experi- ment in rural development with an ex- plicit anti-poverty focus’.

Good if true, though one would like evidence that something more than the wish is father to the thought. The ACC, first of all, will have to shake off a few layers of administrative dust and show that it can muster some worthwhile political clout within the UN system. This is important, too, because the World Employment Conference has ap- pointed the ACC its executor for all subsequent review and monitoring work on the basic needs programmes of the different UN agencies.

Two other reservations, which should not be lost sight of, were posed by Guyana’s Minister of Labour, Mr W. Carrington, in a Plenary speech. One is the possibility that the methods perceived as delivering equitable growth

FOOD POLICY November 1976

- however much more persuasive than what went before - might not actually do so. And the other is a likelihood that the IL0 has seriously under-estimated the opposing strength of groups who will be adversely affected by its strategy.

These are not sufficient reasons for delay in getting the basic needs wagon Robin Sharp

The role of phosphorus in agric~~~~re National Fertiiiser Development Centre of the Tennessee Valley Auttiority,

Muscle Shoals, Alabama, l-3 June, 1976.

Phosphorus is a vital constituent of all living organisms. Because of this, its relative scarcity in the biosphere and the unavailable forms in which it is held there, it is one of the three major fer- tiiisers used in agriculture. Phosphate rock is consequently a major inter- national raw material’ and its availability and price are matters of the greatest economic importance. The de- mand for phosphorus depends upon type of agriculture, level of technology, and relative farm prices, and cannot be regarded as constant. It is then ap- propriate that the subject of phosphorus in agriculture should be surveyed in the widest sense at the conference.

The scope of the meeting can be assessed from the main titles of subject areas: phosphate raw materials; phosphate fertiiiser technology; suiphur and energy requirements; supply and demand; soil and fertiliser phosphorus reaction: soil-plant relations; nutrition of major crops; phosphorus nutrition of animals. As with all meetings of such wide scope, there was a tendency to fragmentation, and to superficiality. However, the advantages of seeing the subject in the round, and hearing of the problems in different disciplines more than compensated for this.

Reserves

The section on phosphate reserves and raw material was essentially optimistic. There were clear warnings that the most easily available and highest quality rock phosphates in America are of strictly limited quantity, but total world

‘See John Edwards, ‘Phosphate rock’, Food Policy, Vol 1 No 4, August 1976, pp 348-35 1.

reserves appear more than ample for centuries ahead, being around 130 OOOM tons of rock. The currently unexpioitabie reserves are of even greater quantity and it appears ex- ceedingly unlikely that we shall ever be in a situation where it is impossible to produce phosphate fertiiiser. Costs and prices are of course another matter, and the utilisation of low quality rock in- cluding those containing high aluminium and iron is vital to this ques- tion. Three papers gave an interesting sidelight on the other requirements for the production of phosphate fertiiisers: suiphur and energy. There appears to be no lack of either. Production of all fer- tilisers only takes 1% of the total US energy use, and of this only 0.07% is used for phosphorus fertiiisers, which puts the currently fashionable energy balance controversy into its proper perspective.

One of the most interesting sections of the meeting was that dealing with the traditional concern of the soil chemists, the reaction of fertiliser phosphate with the soil, and the prediction of phosphate demand of crops. It is a sobering thought that some one hundred and thirty years after superphosphate was invented, there are still wide areas of disagreement in this subject. However, the soil, agronomy and fertiliser work was in the great majority of cases characterised by a critical, scientific ap- proach. There was little of the empirical and very boring work on the effects of different extractants or methods, and a much greater readiness to attack fun- damental problems of soil physical chemistry such as ion activities, sorp- tion and transport mechanisms, and non-equilibrium states.

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