UN warns against feasts in midst of famine
Date: 06-Aug-02
Country: UNITED NATIONS
"We must keep in mind that this conference is taking place in the midst of a major food crisis in southern Africa, affecting 13 million people," S. Iqbal Riza, chief of staff to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, wrote top U.N. managers.
"It would be wise to refrain from excessive levels of hospitality, and any event sponsored by the United Nations should be of modest, even frugal, dimensions," Riza said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.
About 100 heads of state are expected to attend the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development from Aug. 26 to Sept. 4, along with some 40,000 delegates and media representatives.
The conference is meant to build on the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which set out global goals for environmental protection, and the 2000 Millennium Summit in New York, which established goals for battling hunger, poverty and disease.
A four-day U.N. World Food Summit held in Rome in June came under fire from critics for the lavish meals featured during the event intended to lay plans for halving world hunger by 2015.
The United Nations says 12.8 million people - half of them children - are threatened with starvation in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
U.N. officials blame the crisis on a combination of severe drought, floods, economic decline and government mismanagement, aggravated by the region's extremely high AIDS infection rate, which has killed many farmers and left millions of orphans.