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. 10-54833 50 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 10-54833 52 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.