Action Steps After Cancun

The meeting of 22 national leaders convened at Cancún, in Mexico, last October, despite "millimetric progress" (in the words of Willy Brandt), launched a call for "global negotiations." What is meant by this is a series of international conferences, sponsored perhaps by the United Nations, to discuss the major economic problems which have affected the balance of payments and prosperity of many developing countries. Among these problems are food, commodity price stabilization, energy, and the international financial system.

If the experience of the North-South dialogue of the last decade is any guide, there is bound to be a lot of skepticism on both sides of the table about the likely results of this latest effort. The new talks would start in the midst of a deep international recession, which has driven most commodity prices other than oil to their lowest levels in real terms since the end of the Second World War. While this catastrophe obviously stimulates a wide array of developing countries to give global negotiations another try, it also makes it much more difficult for the industrialized countries of Europe and North America to be generous, as they themselves face serious domestic economic and social problems. As of the spring of 1982, the number of unemployed in the United States and the European Economic Community topped 20 million workers.

This article presents ideas on some further steps beyond Cancún. It concentrates particularly on the role of the multilateral development banks and their possible part in energy development.

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