Third World Economic Cooperation

Excerpt from Address by the Honourable Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, to the Third World Foundation – London, October 29, 1979

“… Economic cooperation among developing countries – ECDC as it is called – can take many forms. The sources of energy is one area that can be married to the raw material of another in response to a market somewhere else again. More simply, patterns of trade can be redirected. ECDC invites, indeed commands, attention to the development of commodity associations with the capacity to mobilise, demand and negotiate more equitable terms. But if this is to happen it must be preceded by a common political determination. To the extent that ECDC succeeds, we can expect political will to be reinforced, cooperation justified and unity heightened. Above all it is through this process that the Third World will command more respectful attention from the industrial democracies, not in response to any voice of conscience, however eloquent, but in recognition that an alternative system is being created. It may be that the extent to which the industrial democracies begin to examine their constructive, alternative choice will not be determined so much within their political processes as within those of the Third World itself.

“In the last analysis, the challenge is threefold: to the Third World, it consists of collective self-reliance and internal social justice; to the developed world, it is the substantial transfer of resources that sets us all in motion; to the whole world, it is the new structures that will keep us in motion because we will all share in the fruits of our labours.

“Material abundance is not the sole purpose of human existence; but poverty defeats all other possibilities. Hence poverty is both the ultimate affront to conscience and a certain guarantee of instability. Surely the supreme challenge of our times is to work together to eliminate it from human experience.”