Rice Roots Challenge

A cautious increase in U.S. aid to technical assistance through regional groups and the United Nations, even when combined with a small fund for direct but long-term U.S. aid, will not approach a solution to the immense problems facing the under-developed two-thirds of the world. If this country adopts both methods, it can demonstrate that U.S. aid will continue over the long haul, and that increasing amounts of assistance will be channeled through more acceptable international agencies. But the U.S. program would be still cautions, still small, still limited--a long way from the imaginative plans that this country must consider.

One such plan that deserves U.S. support is a proposed Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development--appropriately labelled SUNFED. With an initial capital of $250 million, contributed by governments and private sources, this fund would provide grants and liberal long-term loans to nations planning basic development projects like roads, dams, hospitals, and schools. In many countries, some of these projects are underway now with substantial outside aid, but there is an increasing desire on the part of have-not nations to repay loans or grants in the future. SUNFED has remained unfed because of the refusal of some Western nations, particularly the U.S., to contribute to the fund before a workable disarmament plan makes smaller defense budgets practicable. Disarmament appears so distant, however, that the United Nations should delay the establishment of SUNFED no longer. The funds this country should contribute to the total $250 million program would barely dent a budget which includes a $44 billion defense program and such a gesture from Washington at this time would inspire an imaginative and needed program.

Valuable as SUNFED should become, however, it would form only a small drop in the reservoir demanded by a large scale program of world development. Conservative estimates put the capital now needed by under-developed nations at $14 billion per year. As basic projects lead to new demands for more material improvement in the next few years, the financial need is certain to skyrocket. A little more land and a little more rice will not satisfy peasants who have suddenly begun to sense that they can change their conditions.

This is the challenge from the rice roots. It exists apart from the challenge of Communism and would demand Western action even if the Soviet Union were not selling a new brand of expansionism. But since the Soviet Union has already entered Asia and Africa with rubles, technicians, and machines, the U.S. is faced with an even more urgent task. For the twin purposes of containing Communism and helping under-developed nations to lift their standards of living have coalesced from Japan to Mexico. President Eisenhower's "Atoms-for-Peace" plan is one daring response to the challenge; President Truman's "Point Four" program was another. Long-term aid, increased allocations to the U.N., and the establishment of SUNFED will also help. But if the United States claims to be something more than the wealthiest suburb of the world, it will have to put to use its full imagination and generosity.