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 managerial skills, will help developing countries mitigate the strains on the rural environment, raise productivity and consumption standards, and allow nations to move beyond dependence on one or two primary products for their export earnings.

76. Future patterns of agricultural and forestry development, energy use, industrialization, and human settlements can be made far less material-intensive (see Chapters 5, 7, 8, and 9), and hence both more economically and environmentally efficient. Under these conditions, a new era of growth in the world economy can widen the options available to developing countries.

77. Reforms at an international level are now needed to deal simultaneously with economic and ecological aspects in ways that allow the world economy to stimulate the growth of developing countries while giving greater weight to environmental concerns. Such an agenda requires deep commitment by all countries to the satisfactory working of multilateral institutions, such as the multilateral development banks; to the making and observance of international rules in fields such as trade and investment; and to constructive dialogue on the many issues where national interests do not immediate}y coincide but where negotiation could help to reconcile them.

78. The Commission therefore regrets but cannot ignore the recent decline in multilateral cooperation in general and a negative attitude to dialogue on development in particular. At first sight, the introduction of an environmental dimension further complicates the search for such cooperation and dialogue. But it also injects an additional element of mutual self-interest, since a failure to address the interaction between resource depletion and rising poverty will accelerate global ecological deterioration.

79. New dimensions of multilateralism are essential to human progress. The Commission feels confident that the mutual interests involved in environment and development issues can help generate the needed momentum and can secure the necessary international economic changes that it will make possible.