IMF leader offers plan to fight world poverty

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund yesterday proposed a new strategy to help the world's poorest countries improve their standard of living. Michel Camdessus proposed a ``growth-oriented'' strategy in a speech before a meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, Switzerland.

Mr. Camdessus said that for the strategy to work, the United States and other prosperous countries would have to boost their contributions to the IMF to raise its ``structural adjustment fund'' to more than $11 billion, triple its current level.

He also asked these countries to lower interest rates on the money owed to them by the 60 prospective borrowers, many of them in Africa and Latin America.

Camdessus said his strategy called for reduced government spending and currency devaluations as well as a stretching out of debt repayments to lending nations. Also part of Camdessus' strategy would be a plan for better financing of the repayments because additional money would be available from the expanded structural adjustment fund, at lower rates and for long periods.