Isaiah Frank

IN the spring of 1964 representatives of more than 110 countries will gather in Geneva for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. To say that the less developed countries have high hopes for this event would be the understatement of the year. Again and again at meetings of the Preparatory Committee for the Conference the refrain was that the Conference would be the single most important international event for the less developed countries since the founding of the United Nations. These countries look to the Conference to lay the foundations for a "new international division of labor"; to formulate a new and "dynamic international trade policy"; and, as one representative to the Preparatory Committee recently wrote, to advance the goal of "economic emancipation" from the neo-colonialism implicit in present trade relations between rich and poor countries.