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OPENING OF THE TWENTY-FIFTH CONFERENCE SESSION
OUVERTURE DE LA VINGT-CINQUIEME SESSION DE LA CONFERENCE
INAUGURACION DEL 25o PERIODO DE SESIONES DE LA CONFERENCIA

Opening Statement by the Director-Genera
Discours d'ouverture du Directeur général
Discurso de apertura del Director General

LE DIRECTEUR GENERAL (langue originale Arabe): Excellence, Mesdames, Messieurs et Messieurs les honorables délégués et observateurs,

C'est pour moi un grand honneur, en ma qualité de Directeur général de cette Organisation, que d'avoir l'occasion de vous souhaiter la bienvenue en cette 25ème session de la Conférence générale de l'Organisation,

Etant donné le niveau de représentation des Etats Membres à cette Conférence, celle-ci se transforme en une réunion au sommet des responsables de l'agriculture dans le monde, et cette Conférence n'a d'égal que la gravité et le sérieux des problèmes qui nous réunissent ici pour essayer de trouver des solutions appropriées

Il suffit que je brosse un rapide panorama de la situation actuelle pour souligner le caractère extrêmement important qu'acquiert cette session de la Conférence. Je voudrais, à cette occasion, exprimer mes voeux les plus chaleureux à tous les participants à cette Conférence et en particulier à ceux qui assument des responsabilités aussi importantes pour la première fois.

Il est heureux que nous ayons l'occasion de vous souhaiter la bienvenue à Rome dans cette cité éternelle, si belle, et je tiens à vous souhaiter un séjour agréable vous mettant dans une ambiance propice qui vous donnera tout le courage nécessaire pour venir à bout d'un ordre du jour très chargé.

Je suis convaincu par ailleurs que vos délibérations au cours des prochaines semaines seront riches, fructueuses et donneront lieu à des résolutions qui seront prises pour le bien de l'Organisation mais surtout de l'humanité dans son ensemble.

Avant de passer à l'examen des grands problèmes qu'elle doit étudier, il convient de résoudre certains problèmes d'organisation et de procédure; l'examen de ces questions va, de fait, vous occuper toute la journée; mais je pense que cela ne sera pas du temps perdu car une bonne organisation du travail se répercutera dans une plus grande liberté d'expression, condition sine qua non pour que vous puissiez prêter toute l'attention voulue à l'étude de solutions constructives aux problèmes qui vous sont soumis.


INTRODUCTION - PROCEDURE OF THE SESSION
INTRODUCTION - QUESTIONS DE PROCEDURE
INTRODUCCION - CUESTIONES DE PROCEDIMIENTO

1. Election of Chairman and Vice-Chairmen (C 89/12; C 89/LIM/1; C 89/LIM/2)
1. Election du Président et des Vice Présidents (C 89/12; C 89/LIM/1; C 89/LIM/2)
1. Elección del Presidente y de los Vicepresidentes (C 89/12; C 89/LIM/1; C 89/LIM/2)

DIRECTOR-GENERAL: The first item on your agenda is the election of the Chairman.

In conformity with Article XXIV of the General Rules of the Organization, the Council has proposed the candidature of His Excellency John Charles Kerin, Minister of Primary Industries and Energy of Australia.

The report of the Council on this subject is submitted to the Conference in document C 89/LIM/1.

Will the Conference endorse this nomination?

Applause
Applaudissements
Aplausos

I declare His Excellency, John Charles Kerin, elected Chairman of the Twenty-fifth Session of the FAO Conference.

I wish to extend to him my sincere congratulations and am happy to greet him not only as a distinguished senior representative of that great agricultural country which is Australia, but also as the son of a nation which, through the work of Frank McDougall, played a decisive role in the birth of our Organization and whose interest in our activities has never waned.

With this association, added to the experience and other personal qualities of Mr Kerin, I expect that the work of this important session of the Conference will be carried out not only successfully but also in characteristic good humour and style.

May I also assure him that both my colleagues in the Secretariat and myself will be at his disposal to assist him in carrying out the tasks now entrusted to him.

I now invite His Excellency John Charles Kerin to take his place on the podium and to assume the Chairmanship of the Session.

Mr John Charles Kerin took the chair
M. John Charles Kerin assume
la Présidence
|
Ocupa la presidencia el Sr John Charles Kerin


Address by the Chairman of the Conference
Discours du Président de la Conférence
Discurso del Presidente de la Conferencia

CHAIRMAN: Mr Director-General, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen: I am very pleased to accept the great honour that the Conference has bestowed on me in electing me Chairman of this, its Twenty-fifth Session.

It is my intention, as Chairman, to aim primarily to facilitate the progress of the Conference, to ensure that all members have the opportunity to put their views and to see that a productive result comes out at the end.

FAO's basic objectives are clearly defined in the preamble to the Constitution. They are still pertinent today, relating as they do to raising levels of nutrition and standards of living, securing improvements in efficiency of production and distribution of food and agricultural products, bettering the condition of rural populations and ensuring humanity's freedom from hunger.

I have been Minister for Primary Industries in Australia since 1983 and attended my first FAO Conference in that year, and have since participated in each conference.

Let me make some personal observations.

Ministers for Agriculture do not last that long. For some of us this will be our first FAO meeting, but others will have been before. The FAO bureaucracy and our own officials, of course, are the ongoing element in each of our country's efforts to support the increased production of food.

If the FAO did not exist, we would have to create it, so important is its work.

Thankfully, the FAO does exist and it is our task as Ministers and representatives of our governments to make sure that we go away from here having expressed ourselves in terms of what should be done.

The FAO should not be the plaything of various blocs, groupings, individuals or philosophies. It is here as the workhorse of the international drive to improve one of humanity's most basic activities - the production of food. With notable exceptions, we pay for and enjoy the benefits of the FAO, so it is up to us to identify what we see as the best processes and directions for FAO.

Whenever I come to conferences such as this, such as the World Food Council, or think about development and development assistance, I am struck by the differences in approach to the question of how best food, fibre and energy can be produced. Of course, different endowments of resources and differing stages of economic development drive our individual priorities.Agriculture is of such fundamental importance that the industrially rich nations use this to blind us to their subsidies for vociferous farm lobbies. Such practices continue even when this denies poorer nations opportunities and even when it acts to the detriment of their own economies. Poorer countries therefore have little choice but to tax their agricultural sector and this, too, distorts production.


Only in the most rapidly developing nations does agriculture play its proper role in providing essential food and fibre and serve, by generating a surplus of capital, for the transition to a mature economy.

In Australia, I know each farm has its own management problem and I believe each country has its own agricultural manage ment problem. The FAO, UNDP, WFP and a host of other agencies exist to help each country with its own problem via the multilateral assistance process.

I always have doubts about the institutionalization of the international bureaucracy, the interminable production of reports, agendas, meetings and texts and the failure to properly co-ordinate development assistance and avoid duplication.

However, when there exist so many differences between us and so many players on the stage, there is no other way to go but to interact, educate each other and exchange views to make progress.

But please remember that with an extra 200 000 mouths a day to feed, we have very little time to do other than focus on those things that unite us and on which we can make progress rather than on those things which divide us.

While substantial progress in a number of important areas has been made over the past 40 years, circumstances have also changed, often in ways which have compromised our best efforts and our best intentions. The very resource base upon which agriculture relies is under increasing threat.

Let me highlight the magnitude of this threat. Each year at least 11 million hectares of tropical forest are lost. The problem of fuelwood is already acute and, by the year 2000, 2.4 billion rural people will face serious shortages. Loss of arable land through land degradation is most serious, with between 5 and 7 million hectares of land under cultivation being lost each year. Arid and semi-arid regions are vulnerable to encroaching desert. Fish resources are also under great pressure.

The backdrop against which these changes occur is an inexorable growth in the world's population. At present, there are around 5 billion people on this planet compared to about half this number when FAO was founded. By the year 2000 this will be between 6 and 7 billion, and most of the new mouths to feed will be in rural areas of less developed countries.

The fact that there exists, still, such problems is not a reflection on FAO; nor does it imply that we have been hopeless in the past, or that we will be helpless in the future.

To me a very important factor in assessing the future direction of the Organization is the Review of FAO's Goals and Operations, which has been carried out in the period since the 1987 Conference.

This will be a most significant item for decision later at this Conference.

As members assess this review, I would particularly like us to consider five statements which I believe to be important in mapping out the future operations of FAO. These are:

1. The need to foster ecologically- and economically-sound agricultural development,


2. The need to move towards an increased liberalization of trade in world agricultural commodities.

3. The importance of the right policy framework being established to allow development assistance and other initiatives to be fully effective.

4. The need to maximize improvements in resource productivity through better management, technology transfer and development of human resources.

5. The need to improve even further the collection and dissemination of vital global information on agriculture, forestry and fisheries and conjointly promote FAO's role as a source of technical expertise.

To be able to make progress on these objectives, FAO needs a system that is very flexible and responsible to both demands and developments.

The Organization must be outspoken when it sees developments in its areas of direct responsibility and expertise, especially in situations that clearly threaten the resource base. This has been occurring in relation to forestry and land degradation but may be also necessary in other areas.

For example, our fish resources are being depleted at a rate which signals only one thing: trouble. As delegates will be aware, this issue is both topical and important to the people of the Southwest Pacific.

By focusing its attention on these issues, we must however continue to give emphasis to activities which will confirm its specialist role among international organizations. By redoubling its efforts to work with those agencies in a complementary and catalytic fashion, the FAO will simultaneously enhance its own capacity and minimize unnecessary duplication.

In recent years, a major factor which now cannot be ignored is FAO's financial crisis. This must be addressed by this Conference.

This arises because, I will be crude, of the failure of a large number of members to pay their assessed contribution. There are, of course, a variety of reasons for this failure to pay but unless members pay they cannot expect FAO to carry out its full programme.

Basically, I can only add my voice to others and appeal to all members to pay and pay on time.

There is a permanence to the nature of FAO's objectives, to which I referred at the beginning. There is more than a symbolic significance to entering on the last decade of the century. And there are unmistakable new signs and symbols of long-term trends and of the opening of new opportunities which will strongly influence our Organization in the future.

As I left Australia, an important gathering of countries, large and small, north and south, had just embarked on an historic new course of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Here in Europe the far-reaching processes of change now occurring on both eastern and western sides of the continent have probably not been so deep-rooted for half a century, and perhaps they have never been so promising.


Delegates, it is proper if I indicate to you the efforts and dedication of the Director-General and the Conference Secretariat. I would expect that there would be no disagreement with my belief that the professionalism displayed by the staff of the Secretariat contributes to the pre-eminence of FAO. And that hard work of the Director-General and the Secretariat will contribute to the effectiveness of this Conference.

Once again, I thank the Conference for the confidence it has shown in me. I can only repeat that I will do my best to help achieve a successful outcome that will set FAO on a productive and positive path into the next century.

I thank you.

Applause
Applaudissements
Aplausos

CHAIRMAN: We now move to the election of Vice-Chairmen of the Conference. Paragraph 1 of Rule VIII of the General Rules of the Organization provides that the Nominations Committee shall propose to the Conference candidates for the three posts of Vice-chairman of the Conference, the seven Member Nations of the General Committee of the Conference required under paragraph 1 of Rule X of the same General Rules, and the nine members of the Credentials Committee as laid down in paragraph 3 of Rule III of the General Rules.

The Nominations Committee which is to make these proposals was elected by the FAO Council at its 96th Session held from 6-10 November, 1989, in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 5 (b) of Rule XXIV of the General Rules of the Organization. This Committee met on Friday, 10 November, 1989, and drew up its recommendation for the posts just mentioned. I shall now ask the Chairman of the Nominations Committee, Mr David Coutts of Australia, to place before the Conference the nominations agreed to by this Committee starting with the three Vice-Chairmen of the Conference. Will Mr Coutts please come to the podium?

David COUTTS (Chairman, Nominations Committee): In accordance with Rule VII-2 of GRO, the Committee submits the following nominations to the Conference: Abdel Magid Al Gaoud, Secretary of the People's General Committee for Agricultural Reclamation and Land Development (Libya); Charoen Kanthawongs, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives (Thailand); and Gonzalo Bula Hoyos, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to FAO (Colombia).

CHAIRMAN: Delegates have just heard the proposals of the Nominations Committee in respect of the three Vice-Chairmen of the Conference. Are there any objections? There are none. I will consider these proposals adopted.


2. Appointment of Generali Committee and Credentials Committee
2. Constitution du Bureau et de la Commission de vérification des pouvoirs
2. Nombramiento del Comité General y del Comité de Credenciales

CHAIRMAN: Delegates, we proceed now to Item 2 of the Provisional Agenda; that is, the appointment of the General Committee and the Credentials Committee. I will ask the Chairman of the Nominations Committee to proceed with his report but let us first have the Committee's proposals for the membership of the General Committee,

In accordance with Rule X GRO, the Committee submits the following nominations to the Conference: China, Fiji, Finland, India, Lesotho, Panama, and the United States of America.

Delegates, you have just heard the nominations for the seven Member Nations to be elected to the General Committee. Are there any objections? There are none. I will consider these seven Member Nations to be duly elected to serve on the General Committee of the Conference.

I now call on the Chairman of the Nominations Committee for proposals concerning the Credentials Committee.

David COUTTS: (Chairman, Nominations Committee): In accordance with Rule III GRO, the Committee submits the following nominations to the Conference: Australia, Canada, Cyprus, El Salvador, Greece, Mauritania, Netherlands, Uganda, Yemen Arab Republic.

CHAIRMAN: Delegates, you have just heard the Nominations Committee's proposal as regards the nine Member Nations to compose the Credentials Committee. Are there any objections? There are none. I will consider these nine Member Nations duly appointed to constitute the Credentials Committee of the Conference. This completes the report of the Nominations Committee. I want to thank Mr Coutts and his Committee for having assisted the Conference.

The General Committee should meet as soon as possible to consider matters pertaining to arrangements for the Conference. In particular, we will have to make proposals to the Conference on the adoption of the Agenda, the allocation of Agenda items to the various commissions, and the admission of Observers. It should report to the Plenary at 15.00 hours this afternoon.

I propose, therefore, to adjourn the first Plenary Meeting of the Conference forthwith. The General Committee - that is your Chairman, the three Vice-Chairmen of the Conference, and the seven Member Nations just elected to it - will meet in the Mexico Room, D-211 on the second floor of Building D immediately after the closure of this meeting.

The Credentials Committee will also hold its first meeting now. It will convene in the Malaysia Room, B-227 on the second floor of Building B. This completes our agenda for this morning. The first Plenary Meeting of the Conference is closed. I thank you.

The meeting rose at 10.45 hours
La séance est levée à 10 h 45
Se levanta la sesión a las 10.45 horas

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