United Nations Daily Highlights, 02-06-10

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From: The United Nations Home Page at <http://www.un.org> - email: unnews@un.org

OF THE NOON BRIEFING

BY

MARIE OKABE

ASSOCIATE SPOKESMAN FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

OF THE UNITED NATIONS

UN HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK

Monday, June 10, 2002

ANNAN URGES ACTION TO CUT IN HALF NUMBER OF HUNGRY PEOPLE BY 2015

Secretary-General Kofi Annan this morning addressed the opening session of the World Food Summit--Five Years Later, saying that there has been too little progress over the last five years in reducing hunger worldwide.

There is no point in making further promises today, he said. The summit must take concrete action to cut in half by 2015 the 800 million people suffering from hunger now.

He called for help to subsistence farmers by giving them greater access to land, credit and technology to grow more resistant crops.

Beyond the farm gate, he added, there must be improvement in rural infrastructure. And we must secure a central place for women, he declared, who are involved in every stage of food production, working for longer hours than men, and are the key to insure that their families have adequate supplies of food.

He concluded by saying Hunger is one of the worst violations of human dignity. In a world of plenty, ending hunger is within our grasp. Failure to reach this goal should fill every one of us with shame.

UN officials addressing the summit, which continues until Thursday and is being attended by some 80 Heads of State or Government, included the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson.

Diouf said hunger had a heavy negative impact on the economies of countries that it afflicts and causes about one percent per year loss in growth due to reduced productivity. Eliminating hunger is a moral imperative, he said, pertaining to the most basic of human rights, the right to exist. The number of undernourished, he went on to say, has fallen by just 6 million per year instead of the 22 million needed to achieve the goals set at the World Food Summit in 1996 and echoed in the Millennium Declaration.

Mary Robinson added that the slow pace of reducing the worlds hungry was morally and legally unacceptable. She said the goal to free humanity from hunger was within reach, but insufficient national and international efforts meant the right to food was far from being realized.

ON MARGINS OF SUMMIT, ANNAN MEETS WITH AFRICAN AND OTHER LEADERS

The Secretary-General held a number of bilateral meetings in the margins of the summit.

He met one-on-one with the President of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah

Later, during a meeting with Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, they discussed the New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD) and the upcoming meeting of the G-8 countries in Canada. They two also met privately for some time.

His next appointment was with the President of Nigeria Olusegun Obansanjo. They reviewed the security situation in West Africa and specifically developments in Liberia as they affected the region as a whole. They also discussed NEPAD and the G-8 Summit.

The Secretary General said that no one wants to invest in a bad neighborhood, therefore he hoped that in the next eighteen months the conflicts in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could be resolved and the continent could have a more peaceful image to encourage foreign investment.

His also had meetings with the Vice Prime Minister of China Wen Jiabao, President Andres Pastrana Arango of Colombia, President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo and President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea.

The Secretary-General later met with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. James Morris, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme, joined the Secretary-General for this meeting. They discussed ways to speed up food aid to Zimbabwe and the other southern African countries currently on the brink of famine.

A meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki was also on his program.

START OF AFGHANISTAN'S LOYA JIRGA PUSHED BACK 24 HOURS

The opening session of the Emergency Loya Jirga, which should have begun at 3pm today in Kabul, was postponed for 24 hours.

The Special Independent Commission for the Convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga attributed the delay to logistic and preparation setbacks.

Abdul Salam Rahimi, a member of the Commission, said that the opening session would now start at 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, June 11. Rahimi said the delay was due to an incomplete final voting list for the Loya Jirga. The most important task at hand, now, he said, was to continue preparation of that list so that it would be ready for Tuesday. Rahimi further stressed that the delay was not due to security or political issues.

[Under the Bonn Agreement, the Emergency Loya Jirga shall decide on a Transitional Authority, including a broad-based transitional administration, to lead Afghanistan until such time as a fully representative government can be elected through free and fair elections to be held no later than two years from the date of the convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga.]

FUNDING FOR RETURNING AFGHAN REFUGEES RUNNING OUT

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has announced that without fresh contributions, it will run-out of funding for its operations in Afghanistan by the end of July, and will have to consider some very hard choices, including possibly reducing or even halting assistance to future returnees.

UNHCR requires $271 million through year-end, but has so far received only $180 million.

With the number of returnees surpassing the 1.1 million mark this week, the current homeward movement of Afghans is already one of the biggest and swiftest voluntary repatriation program ever undertaken by the UN refugee agency.

Although a record number of Afghan refugees have made the journey back home so far, UNHCR says that they still constitute only about 25 percent of the estimated 4 million Afghan refugees forced to flee their country by nearly a quarter century of conflict and instability.

UN AGENCY BEGINS SEARCH FOR RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN GEORGIA

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today began a search for two abandoned Strontium 90 generators in western Georgia.

About 80 people, including radiation experts from the IAEA, India, France, Turkey and the United States, will take part in the search.

Such highly radioactive Strontium 90 sources were used as thermo-electric generators for communication stations in remote areas. Six have been recovered so far, and it is believed that two more are missing in the designated area to be surveyed.

The IAEA has been working with Georgia since 1997 to upgrade levels of radiation safety and security in the country. Todays search marks the first operational phase of an action plan to conduct radiological surveys of selected areas in Georgia.

ILO TO ASSIST JOB CREATION IN OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

The Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO) said today in Geneva that the Office would establish an urgent plan for creating jobs in the occupied Arab territories and appealed to Palestinians and Israelis to take the risk of embarking on social dialogue to achieve peace.

In his address to the 90th International Labour Conference, Juan Somavia, said with your backing, I commit the Office to urgently put in place an expanded technical cooperation programme for Arab workers and other constituents of the occupied territories.

In a review of ILO activities over the past three years, the Director-General said a fresh breeze of creativity is blowing through the ILO.

He cited a host of unprecedented activities undertaken by the ILO since he became Director-General in 1999, including the establishment of new programmes on gender, HIV/AIDS, job creation, technical assistance and health and safety, as well as a widening of the ILOs initiatives aimed at promoting decent work and greater support for core labour standards.

DELEGATES AT BALI CONFERENCE AGREE ON 80 PERCENT OF FINAL TEXT

The fourth and final Preparatory Committee for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) ended in the early hours of Saturday, deciding that its chairman, Emil Salim of Indonesia should facilitate agreement on all outstanding issues in the draft implementation plan to be transmitted to the WSSD in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August.

Discussion on the draft plan reached agreement on a number of areas, about 80 percent of the final text, including issues such as poverty eradication, changing patterns of consumption and production and protecting and managing natural resources.

Agreement was not reached on areas dealing with the means of implementation of the plan.

WFP FLAGS FOOD SHORTAGE IN DEMOCRATIC PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF KOREA

The World Food Programme (WFP) today said the United States has contributed an additional 100,000 metric tons of food aid to its 2002 assistance programme in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. According to the WFP, the U.S. contribution will prevent a rupturing of the aid pipeline to that country next month but would not necessarily help avert a major humanitarian crisis later in the year.

WFP has appealed to the international community to increase its aid pledges to the DPRK, saying an additional 150,000 metric tons of food aid were still needed to enable it to fully implement its emergency assistance operation.

WFPs assistance programme is trying to feed 6.4 million of the countrys most vulnerable.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Security Council has no scheduled consultations or meetings today.

In a press release issued today, the UN mission in Kosovo announced the appointment of Nenad Radosavljevic as Senior Advisor in the Office of Returns and Communities. The Senior Advisor will be playing an important role in helping shape policies aimed at facilitating returns and integration of ethnic minorities into mainstream society in Kosovo.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) today said that in an effort to avoid a repeat of the suffocating smog caused by the forest fires in 1997-1998, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) today signed the Agreement on Trans-boundary Haze Pollution. The agreement is aimed to help the South East Asian states better monitor and prevent smoke from forest fires, which in 1997-1997 caused some $9.2 billion in economic losses in the region.

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