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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 18, No. 2. March 18, 1954

Meeting of International Experts

Meeting of International Experts

I took the opportunity a day or two ago of asking Professor Beaglehole to comment on the programme at present in operation. He told me that the most important resolution of the first meeting at La Paz was an urgent recommendation that I.L.O. and other international organisations should co-operate in planning pilot projects which would demonstrate both to indigenous peoples and to the national states the feasibility of integrating indigenous workers into the social and economic life of their own countries.

It may be remarked in passing that New' Zealand's effort, shared by pakeha and Maori alike, towards a greater social, political and economic integration of the [unclear: Mnori] into New Zealand's national life arouses the keenest Interest in many Latin, American and Asian countries where the present problem of "native" integration is acute.

As a result of the comr [unclear: ttee's] recommendation, I.L.O. and the other Interested agencies established in March, 1952. a planning mission of experts in education, health, social welfare, agriculture and labour problems, led by Professor Beaglehole. The job of this mission was to visit the three Andean countries of Bolivia. Equador and Peru, and after consultations with the governments of the three countries, an on-the-spot survey of the problem of native integration took place. It is not generally known that in the bleak inhospitable Andean plateau at an altitude of from 10 to 17,000ft some millions of Indians of the Quechua and Aymara stock (survivors of the people who once constituted the famous Inca Empire) live as aliens in their own land. Conquered by Spain's conquistadores in the sixteenth century, virtually enslaved thereafter, relatively unhelped by the war of Independence in the early nineteenth century these Indiana live today a life of poverty, disease and Illiteracy, despite sincere but often ineffectual efforts on the part of the governments of the three [unclear: Anikin] countries to improve their lot.

Ernest Beaglehole

Professor Ernest Beaglehole.

In addition to a stocktaking of the progress that has already been made in the And can Indian field the I.L.O. committee of experts at its Geneva meeting will be considering some of the problems of integration that face "forest dwelling" natives who are irrevocably being drawn into the circle of contemporary economic life without any understanding of the catastrophic effects that a modem economy is likely to have upon indigenous social life.

Behind the smoke screen of words, the mud-slinging, the name-calling, the clash of ideologies and propaganda that constitutes the General Assembly of the United Nations and which makes many people from time to time impatient with what they consider to be the uselessness of United Nations today, a considerable amount of solid and important work is being carried on by the technical staff of United Nations and its organisations. This work is unspectacular, seems unexciting, but is important because it is bringing technical assistance to the under-developed areas of the world, and is showing these areas how to short-cut a process of growth that has taken the developed nations two or three hundred years to achieve. (The Colombo Plan is of course, another effort in this direction.) It is appropriate that New Zealand should be able to participate because of her wealth, her high standard of living and her experiences in the development of these international programmes.

—J.B.