Culture is also how we live.

In a market in Ambato, a town south of Quito, Ecuador, two Indian women haggle about the price of food. They engage in a subtle and complex dance of words, gestures and inflections from which only one will emerge as the winner.

A generation or two ago, only anthropologists would have recognized the women's encounter as an expression of culture. Today it is widely accepted that culture is not only intellectual and artistic creativity but also the way people live-how they eat, dress, mate, work; how they see themselves, their own societies and the outside world.

This wider view of culture was endorsed by the 1982 World Conference on Cultural Policies organized in Mexico City by UNESCO-the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Its implications for development are crucial: any development effort that ignores the culture of the target population is courting disaster. Culture-in other words, the human factor, in all its complexity-must be at the heart of economic and technological development. This is not only a moral but an eminently practical imperative: culture-blind development never lasts; in the view of experts, it does not even take off.

To ensure that from now on the cultural dimension is taken into consideration in development efforts, the United Nations has launched the World Decade for Cultural Development, 1988-1997. Why a cultural Decade?

Linking culture with development is the main objective of the Decade. It is an exciting, monumental task. New forms of development will have to be invented. Old forms will have to be studied to find out how they failed or succeeded in handling the human factor. The pay-off? No less than a radically new way of seeing and practising development by the end of the century.

The Decade will open up the vast, unknown territory connecting economic growth with human happiness. And it will start mapping its elusive topography.

Affirming cultural identity is the second objective. This means finding ways to keep alive what is unique in each society without sealing it off from outside influences. In other words, countering with creative diversity the standardization of taste and life-styles now under way worldwide.

The two other Decade objectives refer to culture in a more restricted, traditional sense: opening cultural life to all, particularly women and young people, and promoting international cultural cooperation.

'To trigger the imagination'

At the Decade's opening ceremony in Paris on 21 January, UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor said that it was "an open invitation, a breeding ground for ideas and possible initiatives" UNESCO had no intention of using the Decade to intervene in the cultural life of the countries or dictate to artists what to do. Instead, the whole UN system, with his agency leading the way, would function as a catalyst.

"To trigger the imagination" is the aim of the flexible guidelines already devised by UNESCO for the Decade's activities. The 95-page practical guide" to the Decade, now being published in half a dozen languages, explains what the Decade is about and suggests how to organize and finance activities.

For example, a country could make an inventory of its scientific and technical heritage, or involve social scientists in rural development projects, or promote the integration of traditional knowledge and modern techniques in medicine and pharmacy. Reason ... and heart

Artists and craftsmen from different cultures could work together in a project involving both traditional tools and modern technologies. There is also the possibility of celebrating an International Year of the Arts.

To be effective, projects must respond to local needs, use local resources and promote grassroots participation. They must also be innovative. Invention and efficiency should be the trademarks of the Decade.

The World Decade for Cultural Development will end in 1997, on the eve of the twenty-first century. It is "an appeal to the reason and to the heart of each and every one", according to UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

"Reason, because we can no longer afford to squander this incalculable source of creativity and invention that lies unused within each society ... heart, because in it resides the true, great and inexhaustible wealth that is common to us all . . . "