Office of the Historian

434. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1

Washington, April 8, 1967.

SUBJECT

  • Preliminary Report on the Paris Indian Consortium Meetings2

The meetings appear to have been highly successful. The Consortium has agreed to include food aid in its planning and pledging; it sustained the non-food requirement of $900 million foreign exchange aid; and it has already made additional commitments virtually matching our 3 million tons of food.

There are three types of additional assistance: (a) direct food equivalents, now totalling approximately $70 million; (b) accelerating European pipelines to release real resources this year which normally would not have come forward for a number of years, amounting to roughly $50 to $70 million additional; and (c) debt relief, over and above what donors agreed to do to meet the $900 million foreign exchange requirement. We won’t know the exact debt relief figure until April 25th when [Page 840] representatives come to Washington for a wrap-up meeting to make final commitments. This may total some $139–141 million more.

The Paris delegation recommends that we now release 1.5 million of the 3 million additional tons of food approved by the Congressional resolution. They want to hold the second 1.5 million as leverage until after the April meeting firms up debt relief arrangements.

We’ll report in greater detail when we’ve talked to the people who were there, but the preliminary report looks good.3

Walt
  1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, India, Vol. IX, Memos & Miscellaneous, 3–7/67. Confidential. A handwritten note on the memorandum reads, “Rec’d 4/8/67, 12:30 p.” A handwritten “L” indicates it was seen by the President.↩
  2. Eugene Rostow, who headed the U.S. delegation to the meetings of the India consortium in Paris, April 5–6, reported on the results of the meetings in telegrams 15622 and 15623 from Paris, both April 6. (National Archives and Records Administration, RG 59, Central Files 1967–69, SOC 10 INDIA)↩
  3. Rostow added a handwritten postscript that reads: “in short, it looks as if Gene may have got more than the extra $190 million.”↩