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2. Linking Trade, Environment, and Development
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39. The importance of foreign trade to national development has greatly increased or most countries in the post-war period. (See Table 3-2.) This is one measure of the extent to which trade has made nations, economically and ecologically, more interdependent. Patterns of world trade also have changed markedly. First, the value of trade in manufactured goods grew at a faster rate than that in primary products other than fuel, and a growing number of developing countries have emerged as major exporters of such goods. Manufactured goods now account for twice the value of developing countries' non-oil exports. (See Chapter 8.) Second, the industrialized market economies have come to depend more on fuel imports from developing countries, which accounted for 43 per cent of consumption in 1980-81 compared with only 16 per cent in 1959-60 and even less in pre-war years.

40. The dependence of the developed market economies on other mineral imports from the developing countries has also grown, and the share of these imports in consumption increased from 19 per cent in 1959-60 to 30 per cent in 1980-81. Non-renewable resources like fuels and minerals, as well as manufactured goods, are now far more important than tropical products and other agricultural materials in the flow of primary products from developing to industrial countries. In fact, the flow of food gains is in the opposite direction.

41. The main link between trade and sustainable development is the use of non-renewable raw materials to earn foreign exchange. Developing countries face the dilemma of having to use commodities as exports, in order to break foreign exchange constraints on growth, while also having to minimize damage to the environmental resource base supporting this growth. There are other links between trade and sustainable development: if protectionism raises barriers against manufactured exports, for example, developing nations have less scope for diversifying away from traditional commodities. And unsustainable development may arise not only from overuse of certain commodities but from manufactured goods that are potentially polluting.

2.1 International Commodity Trade.
42. Although a growing number of developing countries have diversified into manufactured exports, primary commodities other than petroleum continue t account for more than one-third of the export earnings of the group as a whole. Dependence on such exports is particularly high in Latin America (52 per cent) and Africa (62 per cent). The countries recognized as 'least developed' for the purposes of the UN Special Programme use primary commodities for 73 per cent of their export earnings. 43. Non-oil commodity prices fell during the early 1980s, not only in real but also in nominal term. By early 1985, the UNCTAD commodity price index was 30 per cent below the 1980 /…