They wanted international...

They wanted international redistribution while basic needs involved a lot of national redistribution. The basic-needs approach was interpreted as a tactic by the developed nations to divert the developing world from achieving a fundamental structural change in the world economic order without which divergence, not convergence, between them would continue and increase.

The director-general of ILO, addressing ECOSOC in July 1978, attempted to dispel these misunderstandings and misgivings. Pleading earnestly for action to create growth and employment as necessary conditions for meeting the basic needs of the very poor, he explained that the basic-needs approach was not an alternative to the strategy for economic growth but represented the introduction of a new variable into the general equation of development.

It was not a collection of non-productive social assistance measures, which some had called 'charity', but an instrument of growth, an instrument to create economic infrastructures and, accordingly, and an instrument to stimulate employment. He recalled 'three convictions' that underpinned the approach. The first was that insufficient attention had been given to the relationship between capital and labour in the production process.

The second was that more vigorous national action against poverty, based on the expansion of productive employment, could help the self-sustained development of the less developed countries by permitting a more rational and productive use of their human resources and 'natural genius'. The third proposition was that vigorous implementation of those measures or policies was meaningful only in a new international economic framework. This last point was fundamental. In the eyes of developing countries, progress in establishing this new international economic framework had been slow, even halting.

In the face of strong, and sometimes over-zealous, advocacy, the basic-needs approach risked eliciting scepticism, and even suspicion. As the DAC chairman of the OECD countries expressed it, there was a 'fear that Northern development agencies will seek to apply it [the basic-needs approach] according to their own values and experience use it to condition economic assistance, in an interventionist way - perhaps as an excuse for not tackling international issues of structural change and economic development' (OECD, 1978, p. 29).

It was recognized that it would be difficult to overcome such fears unless industrialized countries improved their performance in development assistance and made it clearly responsive to needs as perceived by the developing countries themselves, and faced realistically the need to encourage appropriate structural adjustments in the world economy.