FAISAL AND OIL Driving Toward a New World Order

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quite a bit more than the 5% that they now give to underwrite those groups. The producers have been increasing their foreign aid fairly rapidly, but they probably should give much more in grants, low-interest loans and concessionary prices to the neediest countries. Last year OPEC members made aid commitments totaling $9.6 billion and actually disbursed $2.6 billion in gifts, concessionary loans and other aid—roughly half of it to Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Whatever devices are created to put OPEC capital to work in the rest of the world, the Western countries should help the oil producers build up their own agriculture and industries Faisal notes, for example, that his rich country badly needs industrialization. To help prepare the producers for the day, however distant, when their oil runs out, the West should also join them in developing alternative forms of en ergy and should send technology and experts to OPEC countries. Fast development is inevitable in the oil countries, and it will help work off their surpluses by spurring their imports. For their part, OPEC members may lend or invest some of the huge sums of capital that oil importers will need to develop energy supplies from the atom, from shale and sands and, probably many years from now, from the sun and wind.

In the difficult decade ahead, the best hope is that all sides will realize that they are really interdependent—for resources, technologies, goods, capital, ideas. The old world of Western dominance is dead, but if the oil powers try to dominate the new world of interdependencies, the result will be bankruptcies and deflation in the West, and even worse poverty and hunger in the have-not developing countries.

The oil producers, who talk a great deal about past exploitation and their future aspirations, might consider the implications for themselves of the havoc that their monopoly pricing is causing the rest of humankind. The oil consumers, who are the victims of that upheaval, would do well to ponder with more sympathy the OPEC countries' deeply felt desire for a larger share of the world's wealth. In this great global clash of interests, it is time for both sides to soften their anger and seek new ways to get along with each other. If sanity is to prevail, the guiding policy must be not confrontation but cooperation and conservation.

* From which, according to Moslem legend, the prophet Mohammed as cended into heaven astride his favorite white steed, Buraq.

†(The members of OPEC, in order of last year's earnings are: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Al geria, Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador and Gabon, which is an associate member. The United Arab Emirates is a federation of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Quwain, Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah.

* For comparison, 1972 is used because it was the last "normal" year before the embargo and the biggest increases.

* By contrast, West Germany now has the world's highest accumulated surplus, $36 billion. It will be surpassed this year by Saudi Arabia. The highest surplus ever accumulated by the U.S. was $26 billion in 1949; the total for the U.S. now is $16 billion.