BACKWARD AREAS

Although, to the Western scientist, the technical side of production may seem easy, it is enormously difficult to the larger part of the world. Throughout Asia, Africa and large parts of Latin America, production and living standards are dangerously lower than in the U.S. and Western Europe. As India's Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar put it during M.I.T.'s panel on "The Problem of Underdeveloped Areas": "Here are great areas that can fall victim to communism, for what better material for communism is there than people who cannot even sustain themselves? . . ."

Old-style colonial imperialism is dead as an instrument of development. Capitalism must shoulder what President Harry Truman called a "bold new program." Specific examples of what capitalist enterprise can do were given by Nelson Rockefeller, president of the International Basic Economy Corp., a business with the avowed purpose of raising living standards through the use of American know-how in backward areas. The audience sat fascinated as he told how the corporation saved Brazil $100 million a year by spraying coffee plantations with an insecticide, killing an African pest called broca. With obvious pride in American resourcefulness, he gleefully described how the updraft caused by the helicopter presses the chemical against the underside of the infested leaves,"precisely where it is needed.

Harold Stassen, pinch-hitting for President Truman, who was to have delivered the convocation's closing address, made an able, forthright speech in which he made a specific proposal for backward areas. Said he: "The Marshall Plan in Europe has been the most significant single right thing we have done since the end of the war. It is high time that we have a parallel MacArthur Plan in Asia . . ."

This added up to quite an order for America. No one claimed that all the tasks could be earned out. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the convocation was that it heard no boosters of the 20th Century's high towers and great deeds. Yet a quiet optimism persisted. British Scientist Sir Henry Tizard, quoting the remark a school friend once made to Samuel Johnson, summed up the spirit of the conference: "I too have tried to be a philosopher; but I don't know how, cheerfulness kept breaking in."

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