WFP. Executive Director s Opening Remarks Annual Session of the Executive Board 2002

WFP Executive Director s Opening Remarks Annual Session of the Executive Board 2002 WFP Headquarters Monday, 20 May 2002

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR S OPENING REMARKS ANNUAL SESSION OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD MONDAY, 20 MAY 2002 Mr President, Members of the Executive Board, Observers and friends: First, let me say thank you for your wonderful words of welcome and greeting. Jackie and I have now been here six weeks, and I must tell you that we are genuinely overwhelmed with your kindness, your greetings and I must say we are also a bit embarrassed. You have gone overboard with the attention you have directed to us, and you should know from my perspective that the pleasure, believe me, the privilege is mine to be here, to be a part of WFP, to be your colleague, to follow in Catherine Bertini s footsteps and to be a part of this incredibly important work. I have had the good pleasure of visiting with the leaders of the bureau, with the leaders of each of the Lists, with most of my colleagues leading UN agencies, and with most of you individually. The conversations have been positive, helpful and very uplifting. Let me say at the outset that with each day I spend here, I am more convinced of what a tremendous asset WFP is to the world. And for that, each of you here should be proud. The WFP staff is really remarkable, and to join this team is an honour and a pleasure. Their professionalism and competence, their passion, focus and dedication are all very special. Again, I am very grateful for the kind welcome you and my colleagues at FAO and IFAD have extended to me and my wife since our arrival here in Rome. This morning I have been charged with talking to you about some major issues affecting the World Food Programme. That is no small task, and I will try to cover quite a few topics: how we are focusing our efforts to help hungry people; some of the emergencies that will be challenging us in the next few months; and how we are managing the financial and human resources we need to do our work. I am very new here and I have far more questions than answers, and ask each of you to help with your views and advice during this session and into the future. A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial on hunger in Guatemala that I found striking. I quote: "A Reuters reporter recently asked a Guatemalan farmer Luisa Vasquez how many children she had. She answered, 'Three dead and four living'. What killed them? The answer could be seen in the telltale swollen belly of the toddler clinging to her leg: easily preventable illness brought on by malnutrition." I hope our emergency operation helping families affected by drought in Guatemala is reaching mothers like Luisa Vasquez, but it seems to me that the emergency in her life started long ago. Chronic hunger is her real emergency and that of her family. 1

As I have met with you and WFP staff, one theme that keeps coming up is the business of emergencies versus development. I have to confess that in some ways I do not understand the debate. I am pretty convinced that a hungry family in Malawi, Cambodia or El Salvador would understand it even less. When WFP asks for funds for a project to feed families afflicted by AIDS or small children who have lost their parents to the disease, are we talking about an emergency or are we talking about development? Does it matter what label we use? If you have as several African countries now have more than 1 million AIDS orphans, is that not a crisis? When a third of your young people are not going to school, is that not a crisis? When you have an infant mortality rate 20 times the rate here in Italy, is that not a grave social crisis? You do not need a civil war, a drought or an earthquake to have a severe emergency in which food should be part of the solution. Perhaps I do not fully understand the debate in this area, but if WFP focuses its efforts on those areas where providing food is critical where there is serious hunger, malnutrition and poor health then maybe this debate will eventually take care of itself. In the meantime, we will continue to follow up on the Enabling Development policy all of your Governments approved and I hope you will all help steer WFP in the right direction to help people for whom hunger has always been a crisis. WFP is now the largest humanitarian agency in the world and it is focused on the world's neediest and most desperate people. Last week, this Board approved some very critical operations: in Ethiopia, a country whose history has been scarred by famine and still has some of the world's hungriest people; in Angola and Colombia, where civil wars have lasted so long few people remember what it was like to live in peace; in Zambia, where the AIDS pandemic has threatened an entire nation's capacity to feed itself and keep its economy running. These add to a list of very critical food aid operations that require your involvement and support. We have been able to cope with these food aid operations successfully because WFP is now of necessity the leader in the United Nations system for logistics. Our tremendous success in moving food into Afghanistan is a testament to that strength even at the height of the conflict we had 2,000 trucks of all shapes and sizes moving food so people would not starve. It is critical that we continue to maintain this capacity to respond and to respond quickly. Thanks to the Italian Government, the Humanitarian Depot in Brindisi is now on line and so is our Rapid Response Team. We are ready. We will remain a leader in logistics. Now, may I turn my comments to some of our major emergency efforts. Let me begin with the Palestinian Territory. The bloody conflict in the Palestinian Territory has created a significant humanitarian crisis with which you are all familiar. In the last year and a half, 180,000 Palestinians have lost work, there is a shortage of food in hospitals and orphanages, and it is very difficult to move aid into and within the Territory. 2

The Director-General of FAO and I have approved an emergency operation valued at US$18 million that will reach 500,000 Palestinians until the end of the year. In addition, to help us cope with the significant logistical problems, I have approved a Special Operation that will move a fleet of trucks and operators under the direction of the Swedish Relief Agency into the Territory so we can start moving a larger volume of food quickly. Earlier I thanked them directly, and now I say thank you to the Government of Sweden for its support to this critical operation. Our current operations in the Palestinian Territory have received good support from the European Union, the United States, individual European donors and Australia. Given the urgency of need, I hope with our new operation we will be able to expand this donor base, especially with contributions from countries in the region. A prolonged three-year drought and decades of civil unrest had created a deeply entrenched food crisis in Afghanistan, when the events following 11 September 2001 propelled the crisis to a potentially catastrophic level. I am sure all of you are familiar with the tremendous success WFP has had in moving food in Afghanistan. In our new operation, WFP will reach 9.9 million people, with a monthly average of a little more than 4.5 million. We will provide three-month resettlement packages for 900,000 internally displaced Afghans and 500,000 returning refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, as well as food for work, food for education and vulnerable group feeding activities. Responding to the Afghan Interim Authority, we increased our food-for-education targets to 1 million children. At the request of the Secretary-General's Special Representative, our operation will also provide supplementary food rations to civil servants until September of this year. The donors response to date has been very disappointing. Even with carry-over stocks from the previous operation, we have only 54 percent of requirements. WFP has delayed serious supply breaks during April with these carry-over stocks, but what we have in regional warehouses is now nearly exhausted. Despite very welcome loans and we are grateful from the Government of Pakistan, our in-country stocks will be depleted this month. Pipeline breaks are expected in June, and a complete pipeline rupture for cereals is forecast as of the end of July. We have been forced to negotiate with partners to postpone food distributions. For example, we are looking at coupon programmes for late payments against food-for-work and returnee activities; retroactive payment of civil-service rations; and a slowdown in support of educational institutions. Needless to say, we are quite concerned that such a high priority emergency has fallen this far short on funding. I would like to give you now a briefing on the severe food crisis facing Southern Africa. Assessment teams are now pinpointing areas with the greatest need, but our preliminary estimates are that nearly 8 million people will be affected. This figure could rise higher, far higher. The worst-hit areas are Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are also pockets of hunger in Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland. Food prices are continuing to rise, and there are 3

shortages of corn in many markets, so even people with cash cannot obtain enough food. We are receiving reports that families are already selling off livestock and other assets and eating green corn, roots and other pre-famine foods, which is causing an increase in disease. We have taken the following actions: One, we have committed US$5.2 million from World Food Programme emergency funds to jump-start a regional operation. We have extended our existing emergency activities in the affected countries as bridging operations while we put together a regional operation we plan to manage out of Johannesburg. The support of the South African Government will, of course, be critical to our regional bureau. We are working with our colleagues at FAO to ensure that all assessment reports are finished by the end of the month. The fieldwork is complete everywhere but in Zambia. Jean-Jacques Graisse, and Ross Mountain of OCHA, will co-chair an interagency meeting in Johannesburg on 6 and 7 June to review the assessment reports and decide on the future of the regional operations and the possible need for a Consolidated Appeal (CAP). We will have the WFP regional operation up and running by 1 July. We are committing some of our very best talent and have already begun relocating staff. We will always rely heavily on our government and NGO partners. At the Children's Summit in New York, I met with the President of Mozambique and asked for his help on transport charges, duties and port clearances, because moving food through the port at Beira will be important for us. Our Regional Director, Judith Lewis, is also in constant contact with our partners to keep the effort moving. Judith, you may recall, played a leading role in WFP's recent success in warding off a famine in the Horn of Africa. She will be giving a briefing on the crisis tomorrow and is available to you for your future consultation. There are many lessons to be learned in any humanitarian crisis, and this one has more than its share. Like most major food crises in recent years, the causes are partly environmental there is widespread drought but also flooding in some areas and partly economic and political mismanagement. This is, however, very clearly and uniquely a food crisis, though if it is not contained it may soon become political, especially in Zimbabwe. The crisis is beginning to generate a lot of media coverage some accurate, some not. A front-page article in the Washington Post last week declared a "full-blown famine" in southern Africa. That is not yet the case, and we managed to get a retraction printed by the Post's editors, but clearly the pressure is on all of us to help and help soon. You will be hearing about the funding situation for our major operations later this week, but I would be remiss if I did not mention a major problem we are now facing or, rather, that hungry North Koreans are facing because we do not have the resources to help them. Kenzo Oshima, Carol Bellamy and I held a press conference in New York a few weeks back concerning the severe drop in funding to cope with the food emergency in the Democratic People s Republic of Korea. 4

This week, I met with the Ambassador of the Democratic People s Republic of Korea, and we discussed some of the actions they should take to help improve the efficiency of our operation and to help us obtain more resources. Specifically, WFP needs: better access and communications for our food aid monitoring and reporting in the Democratic People s Republic of Korea; a system for medical evacuation of our staff. We need more Korean speakers on staff; more international staff present in the Democratic People s Republic of Korea; a more complete list of institutions receiving food so we can share that with you; and the completion of a second nutrition survey. All these steps will make it easier for donors to move forward. We believe that WFP and the NGOs have made great progress, especially on behalf of the country s children. We must avoid a break in the food aid pipeline. WFP has played a central even an historic role in building contact and providing aid in the Democratic People s Republic of Korea. We are by far the largest foreign presence, and I believe we have slowly gained the trust of the Government. But now our efforts are being jeopardized by these operational impediments and a shortage of resources. Because donations have been slow in coming in this year, we have already had to make some tough decisions. In May, we will not be able to distribute food to the more than 350,000 elderly people and 675,000 secondary schoolchildren. While unfortunate, this decision will allow us to continue providing food for orphans, young children and expectant and nursing mothers into the third quarter. These groups are the most at risk and are entirely dependent on a government-run public distribution system already scaling back its very meagre rations. Supplies of sugar, vitamins and minerals the key ingredients in the fortified blended foods and biscuits for young children that are made at local WFP and UNICEF supported factories are all but exhausted too. We need your pledges now. We need your support, because once a pledge is made it takes two to four months to get that food into the stomach of a hungry North Korean. Poverty and hunger degrade people. And they can do it in horrible ways. All of you have heard the news reports from the refugee camps in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Staff from 40 NGOs and United Nations agencies have been accused of child abuse. There will be, I repeat, there will be zero tolerance for that at the World Food Programme. Because the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has not announced the results of its investigation, I do not have additional details for you. I can say that no WFP international staff were mentioned in the initial report prepared by consultants for Save the Children and the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. We will follow up vigorously on all accusations. 5

Prevention is key, and I want you to know what we have done thus far: We have advised all our staff national and international of United Nations rules and of our zero-tolerance policy with regard to such abuses of power. These abuses have been attributed to male staff. Therefore, we are redeploying and recruiting staff to increase the percentage of women monitors. Sixty percent of the monitors in Guinea are female, and we are hiring four more in Sierra Leone. Two of the five monitors in Liberia are women, and we will also increase that number. We are assigning more international staff to monitoring activities. We are revising our Memoranda of Understanding with NGOs to set clear standards of conduct to prevent abuses. We will be using post-distribution monitoring to check to see that all child abuse and other abuses of power have ceased. Simply, let me make it very clear. We will tolerate none of this foolishness. We will have a zero-tolerance policy. We have made it very clear to our staff, both the international staff and the national staff what our policy is. Catherine Bertini went to the area immediately when this issue was raised, and we continue to make it absolutely clear to our colleagues what the rules are. You should know that WFP has an outstanding record in responding to issues related to all sorts of abuse and harassment. WFP has in fact severed relationships with employees who have been found guilty of sexual harassment. We simply will not tolerate this and we will not tolerate people who find themselves in a superior position, vis-à-vis resources, using that leverage to abuse those who are more vulnerable. We are happy to talk about that more, and we will have a session later in the week on the subject, but I want you to know that I share Catherine s absolute 100-percent firm commitment to this issue and we will not put up with any of that. It is no news to you that food shortages can become a weapon in the hands of those who would abuse their authority in a refugee camp. WFP is trying to find additional resources from donors for the West Africa region, as we have had and will likely have breaks in the distribution of food to refugee camps. There has been some coverage of this issue in the international media, and it was raised as a causal factor in the original report by Save the Children and UNHCR. In fact, despite strong United States and European Union contributions, we are very poorly resourced for this operation, at only around 60 percent well below the average of over 90 percent we receive for emergencies. Food shortages are, however, only a contributing factor. I want to emphasize very strongly that all humanitarian workers must take personal responsibility for their actions, and we intend to see that they do so. A separate briefing will follow on the subject on Wednesday afternoon. The Children's Summit in New York was a very worthwhile experience for me. Carol Bellamy and her UNICEF team did an excellent job, and I hope all of us together made some concrete progress in setting targets to do more for the world's children. We are making some good progress on funding: President Bush just signed legislation that will devote US$100 million to global school feeding, and the World Food Programme should be getting a substantial portion of that funding. This reflects the President Bush s strong personal commitment to leave no child behind anywhere in the world. 6

There is such a tremendous payoff with school feeding: for attendance, enrolment and health. The enrolment of girls, for example, normally rises sharply with school feeding, with recorded increases of up to 300 percent. School feeding is a large component in NEPAD the New Partnership for Africa's Development and we are seeking G8 support to feed 40 to 50 million young African children and bring them into school. We were very pleased that several countries responded to the global school feeding campaign by contributing to WFP: last year, the Governments of France, Honduras, Italy and Switzerland, as well as the European Union (through ECHO and EuropeAid), contributed to WFP school feeding operations. In addition, the Cargill Corporation, a Japanese NGO and a number of individual donors contributed. Canada's assistance was critical to the corollary deworming effort in Africa, and this just demonstrates vividly the relationship between health and school feeding. For a dollar a year, a child can take a deworming pill, and it dramatically changes the impact of the child s food intake. If a child and so many million kids around the world have a problem with worms has a worm in his or her system, it can consume up to a third of the nutritional value of the daily food intake. And we know how, through the school feeding programme, partnering with WHO and others, how to solve that problem quickly. And once again the leverage, and the help in the health of a child, are enormous. This year, we have confirmed school feeding contributions from Andorra, France, Germany and individual donors via the Friends of WFP-United States. In addition, we have been informed of contributions not yet confirmed from three countries and one significant international corporation. We particularly wish to thank the Government of France for supporting the pilot-testing of our new school-based monitoring system using the Argos satellite system. The expanded testing will allow us to get monthly data from schools in at least three countries starting later this year. School feeding may well be our best opportunity to address the crisis of 300 million hungry children and to start the development process at the very beginning of a child s life. This will make possible learning, improved health, maturity, responsible parenting and greater productivity. By bringing children to school and feeding them, we can help focus their lives on hope and opportunity, not hunger, poverty, violence and conflict. We are incredibly grateful that both the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and his wife, Nan, have given their strong support, personal involvement and encouragement for our school feeding programme. We see the Millennium Declaration goals and the strategy prepared by UNDP as a promising approach for better United Nations coordination. You, the Member States, have given us these goals. WFP will play its part on the United Nations team. Following your commitments in Monterey, there now is new energy in development aid and we, the United Nations, are responding as a team. We need to see that these new resources are used effectively and in a coordinated fashion. We, the three agencies in Rome, are especially interested in reversing the downward trend in spending on food and hunger issues that we have unfortunately seen in recent years. 7

In humanitarian affairs, I would like to highlight the importance we attach to working with the Secretary-General's Emergency Response Coordinator, Mr Kenzo Oshima. He is a great friend of the World Food Programme. WFP is training its staff to contribute better to the United Nations Inter-agency Consolidated Appeals. In fact, Mr Oshima's representative in Geneva, Mr Ross Mountain, will address you on our joint efforts tomorrow. Both the World Food Programme and IFAD are working to support Jacques Diouf in his efforts to have a successful summit here in Rome in a few weeks. Our different programmes complement one another very well, with FAO and IFAD taking more long-term, production-oriented approaches to ending hunger, while WFP strives to meet the immediate food needs of the hungry each and every day. This two-track approach is essential if we are going to save lives and halve world hunger by 2015. You have an information paper available to you on how we are collaborating with FAO and IFAD at the summit that goes into greater detail. One of the hallmarks of Catherine Bertini's time here was the shift to focus more food aid on women and children. I want you to know that we will continue that focus, since it will give us the best chance of tackling hunger and malnutrition, which disproportionately affect women and children. The evidence is very clear that malnourished women pass their hunger on from generation to generation, and that giving women control of food is the best way to ensure that families are well fed. So we will continue to emphasize the role of women in food aid. At the same time, the Secretary-General and the General Assembly have set a goal for hiring of women, and I will do my best to reach that goal as soon as possible. There has been great progress, and I know that will continue. We have already met the target you set for employing staff from developing countries, as we now have 41 percent of international staff from the developing world. Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe Catherine Bertini left a great legacy here at the World Food Programme. She has been the best possible friend to me during the transition. I visit with her frequently on the 'phone, often passing on your words of appreciation to her. I am certain her heart is still with you and WFP. I am confident she will always be our advocate and find many ways to help. One of her special concerns was the topic of staff safety and security. It is back on the agenda, under item 6b. This may seem a strange place for it under Resource and Financial Matters but the topic relates to the new funding arrangements for the United Nations security management system, concerning which we promised to update the Board following the final decision of the General Assembly. While the events of 11 September called into question the adequacy of security standards worldwide, this must not overshadow the significant progress made in this area by the United Nations and WFP over the past year, which include: agreement on the cost-sharing formula for field-related security costs; development of minimum security standards for operations and telecommunications; recommendations for improving collaboration on staff safety between United Nations organizations and their implementing partners, chaired by WFP; 8

and establishment of an inter-agency forum on air safety, again led by the World Food Programme. As always, money is not the only issue for the General Assembly, which in its resolution also focused on the questions of accountability and responsibility. These topics, as well as the issue of governance, concern WFP, and we are deeply involved this year in the discussion at all levels within the United Nations system. We were very proud that a former WFP official Mr Tun Myat has been selected to be Assistant Secretary-General to head the office for security coordination in New York after completing his term as United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. All of you had to pass by the memorial plaque in the hall on your way into the Auditorium, and I am sad to report that it includes two more names of staff members who have lost their lives in the service of the hungry poor in 2001: Safi Ullah from Afghanistan and Mikidadi Maarufu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You will find both of their names listed in memoriam at the beginning of the Annual Report. While these latest WFP deaths were through work-related accidents, the number of United Nations staff losing their lives through violence is still increasing. The latest statistics indicate that 204 of our colleagues have been killed since 1992, while only 15 perpetrators have been apprehended. Member States must do more to bring to justice the perpetrators of violent crimes against United Nations staff. As you may recall, one of the prime objectives of the Financial Management Improvement Programme (FMIP) was to improve financial transparency and reporting within WFP. We are now starting to see these improvements and their impact on the organization as a whole. With the implementation of WINGS, the Programme is now beginning to address many financial issues and concerns of interest not only to management but also to donors and Board Members. This had been problematic with earlier systems. I am pleased to report that, for the first time ever, we have a monthly financial statement for the month of April. I do not know how you could manage an enterprise like this without a monthly financial report. The Secretariat has drawn up an ambitious agenda to improve financial transparency at all levels to the Board and to donors and to ensure that our day-to-day operations are carried out in a fully decentralized structure, as effectively and efficiently as possible. This will have my direct and personal attention. We intend to minimize our fixed costs to ensure that the maximum amount of each dollar donated reaches the beneficiaries for which it was intended. In the weeks ahead, we will work hard on several strategic financial issues of direct interest to you. We will ensure that cash balances are maintained only at those levels necessary for effective support of our programmes. Moreover, we now have the capability to better identify unused programme funds to either return to or ask to have them reprogrammed by our donors. 9

Indirect support costs are being reviewed to ensure that that our fixed costs are also set at only the level necessary to operate our programmes effectively. Once that is determined, we will propose an effective mechanism for funding those programmes. Now that we have the tools in place, we also pledge to provide more frequent reporting of both project and financial data. These financial controls should improve not only the management of our projects, but also the transparency of our operations. Of course there are still challenges in the implementation of our new WINGS system, and the Secretariat will continue to address these challenges within the limits of the resources available. But I have been informed by colleagues, not only at WFP but also in other United Nations organizations, that WFP has come a long way in improving its financial transparency. In fact, it does this as well as or better than any other agency of the United Nations family. Of course, this has been possible only because of your strong support and encouragement. We must produce the information necessary to manage WFP effectively and provide that information in an easily usable form for donors and partners, and for our Country and Regional Directors. I would like to pay tribute to Jessie Mabutas and her colleagues for bringing all of this to the point where it is today. We have come a long way in a short period, and the incredible intense effort on this has been enormous, and you should know that we have listened. We know that you are concerned about cash balances justifiably so that you are concerned about indirect support costs, that you are concerned about evaluation and fund reporting, and we are trying to get this to a point where it is prompt and easily used. We pledge to you not only transparency but efficiency. All organizations must build up procedures, and these can become complicated and time consuming. But time is one thing that hungry people do not have. So, over the course of the coming year, I will be taking a look at some of our business processes here at WFP: How can we streamline approval of emergency operations without sacrificing quality? How can we simplify some of our personnel procedures so we can support our staff better and bring in new talent as needed? These are my two primary concerns now, but others may arise as we move along. We intend to minimize bureaucracy and maximize the resources that reach hungry people. I am committed to working closely with you to implement the Report of the Working Group on Governance. The first of the new governance tools the Consolidated Framework of WFP Policies is being presented to you at this session. We are developing the other governance tools results-based management (RBM), a Strategic Plan and a Management Plan in order to further strengthen our management and accountability. Currently, a WFP task force is reviewing all our internal reporting processes to simplify them and to see that they conform with the RBM approach and required governance project reporting. The Secretariat will consult regularly with the Bureau's Informal Steering Group on Governance as we move forward in preparing the Strategic Plan 2003 2007, and defining its relationship with the Management Plan and Annual Performance Report. 10

My views on governance are straightforward: Great organizations have great governance. It is our job to maximize the role that you our stakeholders have in WFP. You must have a strong sense of ownership and inclusion, or we will not succeed. In pursuing that, I intend to be candid and direct with you, and I hope you will be so with me. Please let me share my own thoughts on raising resources for hungry people. First, as far as I am concerned, there are no small donors. I see my job as ensuring that we have the broadest possible base of support for feeding hungry people. So whether your contributions are large or not, I will be pursuing you for contributions, both for our emergency operations and for our nutrition and health projects such as school feeding and mother-and-child health. I think you all appreciate the advantages of the multilateral approach we offer at WFP; such an approach takes some of the politics out of aid. There is a great multiplier effect when we all work together; and when you give us untied funds, we can move even more quickly to deal with emergencies. On this point, I think that it is particularly important for our countries with political interest in an emergency to be actively engaged in helping us feed the victims of that emergency; this would be the case in situations such as those in Afghanistan, the Palestinian Territory, the Democratic People s Republic of Korea and Chechnya (Russian Federation). One area where I have keen interest is in exploring WFP's capacity to tap into private sources of money from corporations, foundations and individuals. If we are successful in broadening WFP's funding base through new private-sector efforts, it is essential that these funds be treated as additional to those your governments normally provide. Right now, without new sources of cash, commodities and services, there simply will not be enough resources available for our ambitious school feeding programme. During the next five years, WFP needs to become even more creative both in fund-raising and cost reduction. I must say I am already impressed with the strength and resourcefulness of WFP colleagues in their new private-sector initiatives. This year we may be facing a reduction in donations from our major donor, the United States. As you know, the United States was exceptionally generous to WFP last year, making its largest-ever contribution to a United Nations agency. But we cannot expect that to happen every year, and we do anticipate a decline in such funding. Obviously our hope is that it will not be too large. But this raises the point that we need to have a very broad base of support. So I appeal to all of you to look at ways you can do more. As you have seen with Afghanistan, the Democratic People s Republic of Korea and the refugee operations in West Africa, we are falling short and we need your help. Poor and hungry people need your help. In future meetings we will be sharing with you some of the strategies we will be employing in raising new resources. I hope each of you will feel free to share your ideas and counsel with me so we can shape those strategies together. 11

My first month here has been exciting and inspiring. One of my most interesting experiences was sitting in on a panel at the Children's Summit not with United Nations personalities, celebrities or politicians, but with some young African children. I really enjoyed that. We were talking about education, and of course I thought of how critical our school feeding programme was to getting 130 million children into school who had never had an education. These youngsters were quite articulate for their age, and one of them hit on a theme that is at the very core of our work together. This young man from Chad had a simple solution for motivating people to do more for children in need. He said: "Listen to the children not with your ears, but with your heart." These children have unexpressed high aspirations and expectations for their countries, for Africa, and for their own lives. We simply cannot let them down. We cannot fail them. WFP offers one of the best opportunities in the world to help these children to a better future. With a little help at the beginning of their lives, we can offer them more hope and opportunity than anyone has ever imagined. In order to do that and in order to respond to the incredible human tragedies caused by all sorts of natural disasters and emergencies WFP begs for and will need your active involvement, your best effort, your most positive and helpful thinking. We will need you to help us maintain the highest standards, strongest possible accountability and a sense of teamwork. We look to you for a real partnership, and we rely on your passion for our common cause, your generosity and your friendship. Like each of you I and my colleagues at WFP care deeply for the hungry people we help each day. We need to do more and do it better, and with considerable respect for those we serve. Thank you. 12 EDST3212E-EB.A2002.doc