UNITED NATIONS: Hoffman's Decade of Aid

The United Nations was a major casualty of last month's Indo-Pakistani war, and not because of its already diminished prestige as an international peace keeper. Halted by the war were a U.N. emergency relief program and a host of development projects in East Pakistan, including a water-resources survey, management training, a fisheries program and the work of an agricultural-training center. No one can guess when they will be resumed in the new nation of Bangladesh. The U.N. Development Program has 86 such little-publicized projects under way round the world, which are often overshadowed by the windy debates of the Security Council. Yet they collectively represent the kind of practical success that the U.N. has seldom achieved in its larger diplomatic dealings.

This week the man who launched the development program and guided it for the past 13 years will retire. At the age of 80, Paul Gray Hoffman still radiates the optimism of the '50s, when many Americans believed that all it took to make a better world was a little more generosity. "All you have to do is focus on improving people's personal incomes," he says, "and you can't go wrong."

Two Rules. From the beginning, Hoffman ran the program by two hard and realistic rules. He demanded that recipient countries share in the cost and insisted that U.N. aid, instead of supplying factories and dams, be used as "seed money" to teach skills and pinpoint resources for others to develop. The Development Program and its predecessor, the U.N. Special Fund, have spent $3.4 billion on 1,430 projects; the program now channels 20% of all technical assistance going to developing nations. The results, though, have fallen short of Hoffman's goal of raising the per capita gross national product of developing countries by 5% per year over the decade (the actual increase has been around 2.5%), partly because population has more than kept pace with progress.

Another reason is that donor countries, asked to provide $300 million a year, have given only $240 million to the U.N. program. (The U.S. contribution of $86 million annually is the largest in total, but only 27th among the nations in relation to G.N.P.)

"It is all unfinished business," says Hoffman. "We have only made a feeble start." Actually, the U.N.D.P. has made a significant contribution to the quality of life in many countries. One of its first achievements was to rid North Africa and Asia of their historic plagues of locusts by means of cross-border aerial patrols and insecticide raids. Since 1966 the program's various studies—such as surveys that pinpoint copper lodes in Argentina, Panama and Turkey, iron ore in Chile and Gabon, and uranium in Somalia —have helped stimulate $5 billion in follow-up private investment. More than a third of all aid has gone to Africa and more than a quarter to Asia for assistance in such basic needs as agriculture, industry and public utilities.