Finance Committee

1. In line with the normal practice to provide statistics on personnel services annually to the Finance Committee at its September Session, the Director-General submits the data in Graphs and corresponding Tables I to IX in this document. The Graphs and Tables show the following:

I. Regular Programme established posts

II. Posts funded by Support Costs and other extra budgetary funds (until PWB 96/97)

III. Provisions for posts in field projects financed by extra budgetary funds and TCP

IV. Post total by location

V. Temporary and non-continuing posts and/or contracts on all sources of funds at Headquarters and in Decentralised Offices

VI. Distribution of staff by gender in the different entitlement categories

VII. Gender distribution by department

VIII. Departures and appointments (turnover rate)

IX. Age distribution of the workforce

2. The figures show the number of established posts as of 30 June 1999 and comparative data for previous years. The data as shown in tables and graphs, reflect the actual degree of implementation of the Programme of Work and Budget (posts and staff) as at 30 June 1999. For technical reasons, the figures on short-term staff in table V only cover the period from 1 January until 30 May 1999.

3. The Finance Committee may note that in the Programme of Work and Budget 1998-99, Support Cost posts as well as specific "Other Funds"posts like the FAO/WB, FAO/WHO Cooperative Programmes, the Population Programme positions in SDWP, Special Relief Operations Service, and others, have been incorporated in the Regular Programme and are no longer shown separately.

4. To reflect any eventual retroactive actions during the restructuring period of the Organization that were not captured in previous years'documents, the entire data set was re-calculated. The method to determine the number and duration of short-term non-staff human resources contracts was modified to reflect more precisely the actual working periods of the category "Consultants when actually employed".

5. The Committee will recall that at its 90^th session (September 1998) it had requested that more qualitative data on the Organization's human resources be provided. In response to that request, Graphs VII through IX provide new information that has not been included in previous versions of this report. It is noted that Personnel Division has begun to develop the processes necessary to define and measure the human capital of FAO. In the future it is planned to report on language skills and level of educational qualifications. In addition, work has been initiated on a performance management project. It is expected that the Organization will be able to provide better information on staff performance, when this project is implemented.