Former UN Ambassador Kenneth Adelman wrote a searing attack on the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Adelman finds it a bit obscene for the UN to spend $55 million to talk about poverty while several million people are on the verge of starving due to said poverty (apparently the United Nations believes if it holds enough conferences it can talk poverty to death).
But the best part of the columns is Adelman’s observation that the United Nations wants to deal with poverty but only if it can keep it at arm’s length,
Since Rio, there have been four U.N. preparatory conferences — PrepComs, in the vernacular, which are U.N. conferences to prepare for this jumbo U.N. conference. The last “PrepCom” was in Bali, with some of the finest beaches in the world.
The other dirty little secret of United Nations conferences on poverty is that they never meet where there’s much poverty. Hence, Bali rather than Jakarta, and Johannesburg rather than Soweto.
Adelman also notes that among other expenses the delegates will ring up this week are literally hundreds of dollars spent per page to translate every speech into English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. Just the money from a single page could mean the difference between life and death for a family in Zimbabwe. Much better, though, to make sure that documents that will never be read again are at least unread in multiple languages.
Source:
A Summit Hard to Stomach. Kenneth Adelman, FoxNews.Com, August 28, 2002.