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The
North-South
Dialogue:
Cooperation
Confro~fation?
by D. Paul Graunke
Communist East and capitalist West discuss ways to sustain an uneasy détente. But another dialogue
between the developed nations of the Northem Hemisphere and the developing nations of the Southern
Hemisphere could have an equal impact on prospects for world peace.
hile the discussions over SALT and nu–
clear testing between East and West grab
most of the headlines and public atten-
tion, another dialogue has been going on
that could be equally ás signifi.cant to
world order.
It
is a. dialogue between North and South:
the North in this case being the developed, indus–
trialized countries located for the most part in the North–
ern Hemisphere (the United States, Canada, Western
Europe and Japan), and the South the developing na–
tions ofLatin America, Africa and Asia.
At issue is the wide gap in per capita incomes between
developed and developing nations. Whíle the developed
North enjoys a percapita income of over $3,000 a year,
the average income in Latín America is only about $600
per person a year, and in South Asia, in such countries
as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it is less than $200.
12
And the gap is growing ever wider. According to
computer analyses developed by Dr. Mihajlo Mesarovic
of Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio),
if historical growth patlerns prevail. the gap between
income
in
the developed nations and Latín America will
grow from a ratio of 5 to
1
today to 8 to 1 in the next
fi.fty years. The gap between the income of the deve.l–
oped nations and the South Asia region will grow to over
20 to 1- a tragic corroboration on a global seale of the
old cliché "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
For the South this yawning gap is intolerable and
uojust. They have long felt that they have a
right
to a
greater share of the richer nations' wealth. They justify
this claim by pointing to past colonial exploitation and
present abuses by the Northern multinatiooal corpora–
tions. They insist that the developed nations have a duty
to reverse the growing income gap. To accomplish this,
The
PLAIN TRUTH
February 1978