Statement by Ambassador Vassily A. Nebenzia, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, during the UN Security Council meeting on maintenance of international peace and security
The Russian Federation agrees that we should not accept the fact that 108 million people around the world, of whom 52 million are children, are starving.
We support the determination of the Secretary-General and the plans of the United Nations specialized agencies to draft a strategy to tackle that challenge. We believe that, among other things, the success of our common struggle will depend largely on how correctly we identify the causes behind that issue.
We believe that the premise that hunger is primarily triggered by conflict is extremely simplistic. The presidential statement on hunger and on famine adopted by the Security Council in August (S/PRST/2017/14) rightly noted that conflicts are only one of the factors that cause hunger.
It would be wrong to slight the no less and indeed often more obvious reasons for hunger, such as global food-market volatility, global economic stagnation, slow progress in achieving sustainable production and demand, gaps in access to farming and agro-industrial technology, lack of investment, and plain underdevelopment, poverty and inequality. We believe that without accounting for all of these factors, an effective response strategy is hardly possible.
In our view, we can find a solid basis for this argument in the official annual report of the United Nations agencies, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, which the Secretary-General mentioned today. The report states clearly that of the 815 million malnourished people worldwide, 489 million live in conflict-afflicted countries, which means that the remaining 320 million who do not live in such countries are still experiencing equally and sometimes even more severe food shortages. Incidentally, the same report has another noteworthy statistic, which is that the prevalence of hunger in conflict-ridden countries is only between 1.4 per cent and 4.4 per cent higher than in other countries.
Of course, that does not mean that we should pay less attention to the issue of hunger and famine in conflictafflicted countries. We believe that to seriously improve the food security situation, we should implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, ensure sustainable agricultural production, make rational use of natural resources and improve effectiveness and modern practices at every stage of the food chain.
One current challenge is including the question of balanced nutrition within comprehensive strategies for socioeconomic development. In that regard, the relevant United Nations entities — the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development — have a significant role to play. All of these issues are being fully and productively discussed in the General Assembly.
Russia, as a major producer and exporter of foodstuffs, is making a significant contribution to global and regional food security. Together with major international entities, including the United Nations, we are implementing a development project designed to ensure food security and sustainable agrarian production for countries in need. In the past 10 years, Russia has delivered humanitarian assistance in the form of a total of 650,000 tons of food supplies to more than 110 States.
Furthermore, every year for the past few years Russia has conducted more than 45 humanitarian operations delivering humanitarian assistance amounting to some $120 million. We view the WFP as one of the key channels for delivering food assistance to those in need, and Russia’s annual assistance through the WFP totals more than $30 million. We also deliver significant humanitarian aid through the International Civil Defence Organization, amounting to another $30 million. In 2017, recipients of Russian food assistance through the WFP included Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Syria, Palestine, Namibia, Kenya, Iraq and Jordan.
Russia has undertaken considerable efforts in the area of school meals, financing relevant projects in various Central Asian countries through the FAO. Needless to say, we consider aid to countries with acute hunger and famine issues, particularly Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, to be extremely important. In the past four years, Russia has allocated food assistance to those countries amounting to $8 million through the WFP. Since 2015 we have delivered some 110 tons of humanitarian cargo to Yemen, including two Russian emergency flights this July.
Russia intends to continue actively contributing to international efforts to arrive at a comprehensive solution to the problem of ending hunger worldwide.
