I bring
a message on behalf of the President of the Republic of
Benin, His Excellency Mr. Boni Yayi, who was not
able to come to New York because of scheduling
conflicts. He shares the ambition of the President of the
General Assembly at the sixty-fifth session to build a
United Nations that is strong, inclusive and open as a
guarantor of global governance. I am convinced that
the productive experience of the President of the
General Assembly at the head of the Swiss
Government, which enabled his beautiful country to
enter the United Nations, will be a valuable asset to us.
From this perspective, Benin will make its contribution
to the work of this session and, in so doing, will strive
to promote the ideals of the Charter, to which my
country reiterates here its full support.
I would also like to express to Mr. Deiss my
warm congratulations on his election as President of
the General Assembly at the sixty-fifth session. His
predecessor, His Excellency Mr. Ali Treki, who
brilliantly led the work of the General Assembly with
respect to Africa, strove to find appropriate solutions to
the great challenges facing humankind with skill and
tact throughout his mandate. We pay tribute to him for
his good and loyal service to the international
community.
I would also like to welcome the courageous and
determined action of His Excellency Mr. Ban Ki-moon,
Secretary-General of the United Nations, and commend
him for having taken the measure of the grave crises
affecting the world and for his ongoing commitment to
the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals
by 2015. Thanks to his bold initiatives to promote
international cooperation, he has been able to revive
the virtues of multilateralism as the optimum way to
manage world affairs in an inclusive and participatory
framework that stresses the uniqueness of our world
and the common responsibility of human beings to
maintain the fundamental balances on which human
survival on Earth depends and the sustainability of the
biosphere.
The trail blazed by the founding fathers of the
United Nations in the areas of international peace and
security, the promotion of human rights and
development is that of dialogue, cooperation and a
global partnership to promote the common good of
humankind.
The raison d’être of the United Nations is not
only to provide a framework of reference and universal
convergence to coordinate national policies, but also
and above all to address interests with respect to the
parameters that define areas of tension between
aspirations and the demands of our peoples and States
in all their diversity.
If the United Nations did not exist it would have
to be created, because we cannot imagine a world
today without the United Nations. I would therefore
like to express Benin’s commitment to the
irreplaceable role of the United Nations and its funds,
agencies, programmes and various specialized
institutions, which provide an invaluable service to
humankind as a secular extension of our collective
conscience.
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The High-level Plenary Meeting on the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) convened by
the Secretary-General defined a programme of action
to achieve the Goals by 2015. In implementing these
measures, it is important to take continuously into
account the deadlines set for the achievement of the
MDGs in the light of the additional difficulties related
to the current crises of the financial and economic
system and to previous crises.
It is the duty of the international community to
mobilize the resources necessary to address the grave
distortions that caused these crises. Vulnerable
countries must make investments to relaunch
sustainable agricultural production and maintain
sustained growth capable of generating long-term
prosperity and sustainable human development,
because the achievements of the Millennium
Development Goals must be guaranteed in perpetuity.
The United Nations must now, and with a sense
of urgency, use its full influence to provide the means
to help countries in difficulty ensure the survival of
threatened populations and vulnerable groups that
could be decimated by famine and disease if nothing is
done to help them. The time has come to give
substance to the right to food because it is
unacceptable that hunger should persist among the
causes of human suffering in the twenty-first century.
In the short term, priority focus should be on
strengthening social protection systems in low-income
countries and on reactivating dormant local production
capacity by promoting small and medium-sized
agricultural businesses in order to avoid a drastic
increase in the number of people living in extreme
poverty.
In the medium and long terms, it is necessary to
rethink policies to promote investments in agriculture
in order to re-establish the balance between cash crops
and food products and thus ensure food security in
countries, taking their cultural specificities into
account.
The international community must begin to
evaluate the effectiveness of its strategic monitoring
mechanisms in order to strengthen their ability to
foresee systemic shocks. What is predictable should be
predicted in order to define a long-term approach and
to build, on the basis of available scientific data, a
desirable future for our countries and peoples, who
must cooperate to that end.
In this respect, the proposal to increase the
agricultural share of official development assistance from
3 per cent to 10 per cent is a strategic approach that
should be implemented with common political will
commensurate to the challenge. Here, I pay tribute to
countries that have already made concrete commitments
to providing additional resources to that end.
Benin is an agricultural country, and agriculture
must serve as a springboard for its development. In that
regard, the Government of Benin is working to promote
synergistic growth and the fight against poverty in order
to align democracy and new-found freedoms with shared
prosperity by carrying out the social transformations
necessary to ensure the effective participation of all
sectors in national development efforts.
The Government of Benin is working to promote
agricultural mechanization, but given that the latter
cannot have the desired impact without water
management, we are also planning for rational
management of that resource in order to maximize its
use and ensure its sustainability. These investments
will allow us to make the work of farmers less difficult
and to limit post-harvest losses in order to ensure that
agricultural production covers national needs and
generates surplus for export.
In the framework of efforts to diversify
agricultural production, the Government of Benin is
also working to promote crops for marginal farming
land to produce biofuel. The goal is to reduce
dependence on and the rising cost of hydrocarbons,
which have been exacerbated by the drastic drop in
hydroelectric power caused by climate change, which
has also seriously affected the country’s economic
activity in recent years.
West Africa has been deeply affected by soil
degradation, coastal erosion and the effects of frequent
floods due to climate change. Here, we express our
appreciation for the awareness-raising undertaken by
the secretariat of the United Nations Convention to
Combat Desertification. It is important to devote more
resources to implementing the Convention in the
framework of fighting climate change.
Adaptation and mitigation measures should be
implemented with a sense of heightened urgency in
order to help regions affected. Financial and
development institutions should pay special attention
to programmes to revitalize soil and to promote
irrigation farming and reforestation, using species that
51 10-54833
can increase food availability. We reaffirm our
sympathy for countries that have been struck this year
by natural disasters, in particular earthquakes, and
Haiti in particular, with which we share close lineage
and cultural ties.
My country, Benin, will hold presidential and
legislative elections in March 2011. After 20 years of
democracy during which elections have been organized
on the basis of manually recorded lists, my country’s
Government, in collaboration with the United Nations
and its development partners, has finally decided to
create a computerized permanent electoral list that will
ensure transparent elections and significantly reduce
complaints and other post-electoral difficulties. The
political class of Benin agrees unanimously on the
need for such a computerized list, but differences
remain with respect to the process, the timing of its
implementation and its use for the presidential and
legislative elections in March 2011.
I am confident that, through dialogue and Benin’s
creative genius, which ensured the outstanding success
of the national conference of political stakeholders in
February 1990, Benin will be able to meet this
challenge and once again surprise the world. I call on
the United Nations and the international community to
continue to support the efforts of the Government of
Benin to work successfully to address the major
challenges of today and the future.
We must maintain international peace and
security. This is the first of the major tasks assigned to
the United Nations. In spite of the tireless efforts of the
Organization alongside regional organizations,
humankind continues to suffer as a result of ongoing
armed conflicts, the destructiveness of which leads to
unimaginable suffering for affected populations.
Terrorism, which we condemn without
reservation in all its forms and manifestations, also
continues to indiscriminately afflict innocent civilian
populations, including humanitarian workers and
United Nations personnel despite the specific
international protection they enjoy.
We are concerned by these serious infringements
of the humanitarian principles relevant to conflict
situations. We must work to strengthen the authority of
international humanitarian law and the multilateral
international justice institutions in order to increase
their deterrence capacity with respect to serious crimes.
Here my country reiterates the importance it
assigns to the responsibility to protect, and we will
spare no effort to ensure its operationalization in
accordance with the fundamental principles of the
Charter of the United Nations.
We appeal to all peoples and to all citizens of the
world to respect the value of human life and to work in
a spirit of peaceful coexistence and good-neighbourliness
to resolve their disputes through cooperation, exchange
and seeking mutual understanding, promoting a culture of
peace and dialogue among religions for the common good
of all humankind, at peace with itself.
To this end, we must pay greater attention to
efforts to eradicate the underlying causes of conflict
and in particular to put an end to the illicit trade in
small arms and light weapons that leads to their
proliferation and thus to lawlessness and insecurity in
our towns and countryside.
Respect for human rights and civil liberties
means that human beings must be placed at the centre
of sustainable development efforts, and it is the duty of
the international community to ensure this. It is
essential that respecting human rights become a way of
life and the essential standard that validates human
behaviour on a daily basis so as to promote mutual
respect, equal opportunities in life and the full
realization of the potential of every individual.
In this context, I would like to highlight the
important role young people and women have to play
in the development of our countries. In declaring the
year that began 12 August 2010 as the International
Year of Youth, the General Assembly highlighted the
contribution that young people make to society. We
urge all Member States to give concrete substance to
the International Year of Youth, in line with the
situation in their countries.
The theme of the Year, “Dialogue and Mutual
Understanding”, aims, moreover, to foster alliances
among the generations. The Government of Benin is
determined to make its modest contribution by
supporting the effective holding of the United Nations
Conference on Youth, which is currently being
prepared, to mark the Year.
With a view to ensuring that the potential of
women, who represent more than half of the population
of my country, is fully realized, the Government has set
up a National Institute for the Promotion of Women. A
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microcredit programme for the poorest women was also
launched to ensure the promotion of their economic
activities. To date, this programme has helped to
empower almost 600,000 women by providing income-
generating activities. The programme should be
expanded, which will require additional financial support
from the international community and, in particular, from
technical and financial partners.
Promoting the rule of law at the international
level requires the effective participation of all peoples
in the management of world affairs in the interest of
current and future generations. In particular, the
representation of developing countries should be
strengthened in the decision-making bodies of the
international financial institutions, as should their
accountability. Their institutional mandates should be
redefined so that they better help to mobilize resources
in support of the development of the least developed
countries, while ensuring the stability of the
international financial system.
The Security Council is an essential instrument
for global governance. Its long-awaited reform cannot
be postponed indefinitely. Reform efforts are being
held hostage by the inherent contradictions in today’s
international relations and remain hopelessly at a
standstill despite the crucial importance we all
recognize them to have for the effectiveness of the
Organization. The ongoing negotiations towards reform
must be carried out in good faith and with a keen sense
of responsibility in order to preserve the credibility of
the Organization, which has been beset by heavy
liabilities.
Let us avoid trite formulations that evade the very
essence of reform, which is to ensure the equitable
representation of States in both categories of membership
and to guarantee that the Council’s decisions have the
transparency, legitimacy and authority necessary for it
more effectively to uphold its primary responsibility for
the maintenance of international peace and security.
In this respect, Benin reaffirms, from this
rostrum, Africa’s legitimate aspirations. The
democratization of the United Nations also means a
stronger commitment to respect for national and
international law on the part of Member States.
Here Benin renews its firm commitment to
continuing to contribute to the ongoing adaptation
efforts of the Organization, which is solidly anchored
in its main principles of the sovereign equality of
States, respect for human dignity, the promotion of
development cooperation and the search for the best
solutions to the world’s problems.
In this spirit, I should like to conclude by making
an urgent appeal for the strengthening of international
cooperation. International cooperation is neither a form
of social assistance nor an organized hybrid system of
begging and deception. It should be based on
legitimate mutual interests — a joint effort towards a
contract of solidarity, which would enable us together
to attain the means to forge conditions for humanity to
live in greater dignity and with ever-greater creativity.
This is the thought that inspires us in this year when
we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
independence of 17 African countries.