Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at an open VTC of UNSC members "Maintenance of international peace and security: Food security"
Mme.President,
We thank our briefers - the Secretary-General, David Beasley, and Gabriela Bucher for sharing an analysis of the situation with food security.
Mme.President,
Since you chose such a pressing issue for the topic of the flagship event of your first UNSC Presidency, we believe it highlights your support for more robust joint action aimed at solving the problems with food security. We must say that strengthening of cooperation of UN Member States in this area is a priority for us. The international community needs to make coordinated efforts to respond to the growing challenges at the socio-economic track related to the eradication of poverty and famine, containing the climate change and migration. Without such collective efforts and mutual confidence, we cannot expect effective implementation of the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals.
At the same time, we believe that to achieve tangible results, we need to avoid a situation when the Security Council starts to interfere in the fine-tuned and effective work of the General Assembly at this track, and the work of specialized UN agencies mandated to address food security and counter hunger. In this regard I would point out the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the first place.
The contribution of the WFP to resolving the acute problem of food shortages in countries with a complicated military and political situation can hardly be overstated. We regret that the briefers’ list for today did not include a representative of FAO, since it is a leading UN agency operating in the area of food and agriculture, it is an “organization of knowledge” that has a unique methodological capacity that allows to provide a comprehensive assessment of the situation with food security. Alongside with the WFP, FAO works on risk assessment. The two organizations stand at the helm of the UN humanitarian cluster in the area of food security.
Mme. President,
The real, thorough and productive work aimed at better coordination of the international activity at this track, as I already mentioned, is underway at the specialized platforms of the WFP and FAO in Rome, and in other bodies of the economic cluster. We are not quite sure that Security Council’s involvement in this discussion would have any “added value”. Therefore, we stand against the idea of appointing a focal point to monitor the implementation of UNSC resolution 2417 (2018). Such activity would only add turmoil to the work of the Rome agencies.
Such position of ours does not mean that we consider these topics and the problems of hunger unimportant. We do not deny that for some regions or countries such issues as climate change, hunger, migration can serve as extra factors that encourage conflict, however such phenomena should be analyzed separately in every concrete situation. It would not be justified to speak of it in generic terms and in a global context, and even harmful – to assert that such interlinkage be imminent. Besides, not every conflict poses a threat to the international peace and security – areas under the Security Council consideration. And not every hunger-engulfed country lives through a conflict.
In the same fashion, we do not agree that focus should shift onto conflict while putting other causes of hunger on the backburner. Among those other causes we should name voluntary acts of some countries that escalate internal political crises. By a “strange” coincidence, the tragedy of hunger comes to the areas where state institutions were previously ruined. This is what exacerbates conflicts and steps up risks for national food security. A vivid example is the situation that we daily see in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia. We can single out Yemen as the most characteristic case. In Yemen, it was not hunger that provoked an armed conflict, but vice versa.
We need to draw our lessons from these situations. Then tragic humanitarian catastrophes will be much fewer on this planet.
Mme.President,
In the context of the attempts to anchor the issue of conflict-induced hunger on the UNSC agenda, we observe them with great concern as lobbying of substitution of notions and ungrounded linkage to the adjacent topics. We cannot agree that there is a nexus between food security and protection, which we were offered to make a central track of the activity of humanitarian workers. We believe that to condemn states for refusal or late submission of data means to interfere in internal affairs. Cooperation should be voluntary and unconditional. The problem of ensuring food security amidst an armed conflict is directly related to observance of the international humanitarian law and improving the efficiency of humanitarian response. As for ensuring resilience of food systems in the face of the climate change, it belongs with the area of sustainable development and is not directly related to the activity of the Security Council.
With this in mind, we do not deem it necessary to task the Secretary-General with making mandatory biannual reports to the Security Council about emerging crisis situations with regard to conflict-induced hunger. The Secretary-General has been holding a corresponding mandate since 2018, when UNSC resolution 2147 was adopted. Nothing prevents him from reporting to the Council on concrete countries engulfed in hunger.
Mme.President,
Coming back to the point, let me stress that new opportunities and capacities for local productions, stable global commodity markets, more liberal trade, and minimization of aftereffects of natural disasters – all this would reanimate economies devastated by conflicts. And one of the most important and obvious ways to eliminate their root causes would be to lift sanctions and unilateral coercive measures. Therefore, we can only welcome the recent decision of the new US Administration to reconsider sanctions against “Ansar Allah”. But for this, the situation with hunger in Yemen would have reached a point of no return.
Russia supports that we should promptly respond to the problem of hunger. However, we should do this within the mechanisms that are specifically mandated to address these issues and that take into account the complex nature of challenges to sustainable development that affected states are faced with.
Thank you.
