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autonomy in matters particularly of trade and finance, as well their ability to provide acceptable (i.e. official) certificates of origin.
Reverse Preferences
11. The U.S. have said they will insist that developing countries wishing to be accepted as beneficiaries of the U.S. scheme must, if they accord any reverse preferences to developed countries (whether under CPA or E.E.C. Association arrangements), undertake to phase these out by 1975 at the latest. We consider this faces the developing countries affected (including certain Commonwealth countries) with a quite unfair "Hobson's choice". We therefore hope that the Administration may yet modify, if not drop, this condition, and that Congress would accept this. But we are not optimistic.
The U.K. and the GPS
12. The United Kingdom has supported the concept of generalised, non-discriminatory, non-reciprocal preferential treatment for exports of developing countries since it was first formally put forward in UNCTAD I in 1964. The United Kingdom" (whose delegation was led by the Frime Minister, then Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development) was in fact the first major developed country to lend its support to the idea, on which agreement has now been reached in UNCTAD and which has been endorsed
by the United Nations General Assembly as an integral part (paragraph 32) of the International Development Strategy. illustrative material on the United Kingdom's role is to be found in the DTI article referred to in paragraph 3 above and in the Prime Minister's speech at the Commemorative Session of the United Nations XXVth General Assembly in October 1970 (Cmnd 4568, page 73).
13.
The "Group of 77"
Following is a complete list of present members:
Useful
Afghanistan
Barbados
Brazil
Algeria
Bolivia
Burma
Argentina
Botswana
Burundi
Cameroon
Ceylon
Colombia
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
Congo (Democratic Republic)
Congo (People's Republic)
Costa Rica
-LE-
/Cyprus
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