Allow me first to convey to
the President my warmest congratulations on his
election to guide the work of the sixty-sixth session of
the General Assembly. I have no doubt that under his
leadership, Qatar will be instrumental in the service of
his presidency, and, indeed, in that of the Assembly as
a whole, as we face the challenging times ahead. I also
recognize the service of his predecessor and wish to
record our appreciation for that service. To our
Secretary-General, I offer my delegation’s
congratulations on the renewal of his mandate, an act
that bears testimony to the confidence placed in him by
the Member States of this body.
This is the last time that I will address this great
Hall as President of my country. Before the end of the
year, I will be proud to be the first President of Guyana
to demit office under the constitutional term limits that
I signed into law in the early days of my presidency.
Inevitably, that milestone has caused me to look back
on the changes that have taken place in this body since
I first stood here 12 years ago. Three things strike me
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as I reflect on the role of the United Nations over those
12 years.
The first is that the central point that I and others
have repeatedly made from this rostrum stays as true
today as it was when we first articulated it. The core
point is that, while the values that inform the work of
the United Nations and our Member States — the
values of peace, equality and justice — are timeless,
they are of limited use unless we, as the United Nations
and as individual Member States, draw on them to
catalyse consistent, meaningful and practical responses
to the contemporary changing challenges that our
peoples face.
The second point that strikes me is how utterly
different today’s contemporary challenges actually are
when compared with those of just 12 years ago, not to
mention those of the 1940s, when the United Nations
was founded. The rise of China, India, Brazil and other
developing countries is transforming the globe for the
better. Billions of people have been lifted out of
poverty; new businesses are generating millions of
jobs, growth and capital; and there is once again
genuine intellectual debate about the right way to
embed rights and justice at the core of the global
governance structure.
However, the emergence of those great Powers is
happening in a totally different way to how Powers
emerged in the past. They are emerging in a world that
is interconnected through instant communications
capabilities and globalized trading and financial
systems. What we are witnessing is unlike anything
that has happened before, and few communities and no
country on the planet are not impacted, almost in real
time, by those changes as they happen.
That presents the United Nations and its Member
States with a great opportunity to realize our values
and to secure the global peace, justice and security to
which we aspire. But to do so, we must face up to the
opportunities of interconnectedness with responses that
are interconnected. Our record on international
collective action in recent years is not good.
That leads me to my third point, which is that the
search for justice and the achievement of rights for all
require us to broaden our traditional understanding of
security. We must struggle to achieve rights in a new
way and, as many have said before me, alongside the
physical security challenge, there are many other
aspects to human security and the realization of rights.
I think that there are four other elements of security, in
particular, that we need to properly understand.
First is the challenge of food security. We are
heading for 8 billion, then 9 billion people. Rising
prosperity means that those people want greater
amounts of, and more nutritious, food. By current
trends, we need 100 million hectares of new land by
2020 to meet that demand. How do we do that and
avoid excessive price increases and volatility?
Second is the challenge of energy security. As the
world gets richer, our demand for energy increases
massively. We are likely to demand 36 per cent more
energy by 2035. How do we generate the energy
needed to meet such demand in a way that helps people
everywhere to develop and does not choke off
economic growth through high prices caused by energy
scarcity?
Third is the challenge of resource security. If we
are to alleviate poverty, countries need to develop. And
if countries are to develop, they need minerals and
other commodities. China alone accounts for more than
a third of the demand for many of the most important
global commodities, and countries across the world,
most notably in South America and Africa, can supply
them. How do we help global development by sourcing
such minerals and using them efficiently and justly?
Fourth is the challenge of climate security. If we
are to avert the biggest economic and social
catastrophe ever seen, we must stabilize our planet’s
climate. At the absolute limit, that means stabilizing
global temperatures at a maximum of two degrees
above pre-industrial levels. Yet we are on track towards
perhaps a four- or five-degree rise, according to the
United Nations Environment Programme. The disaster
that this could represent is beyond anyone’s
comprehension. And the fact that we are not treating it
as an emergency will be viewed by history as the
biggest derogation of responsibility by societies and
Governments to ever take place. How can we rapidly
change that situation before we run out of time?
Those four challenges represent both
opportunities and difficulties. The difficulties are
obvious, but they are opportunities in the sense that we
have enough land, innovation and human ingenuity to
feed the world. We have enough clean energy potential
to power future prosperity. We have enough resources
to provide the foundations for economic growth. We
know that to avert climate change means using fossil
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fuels and land in the right way. Once we start realizing
those opportunities, we can create new platforms for
peace, development and physical security.
That sounds an impossible task, but I would
argue that it is not. There are solutions to enable those
opportunities to be grasped today, and the United
Nations can provide the platform for making the
changes that are needed. We can do that if we draw
motivation from the realization that the idea of
integrated sustainable development, where we optimize
our response to the interlinked security challenges, is
not some abstraction for environmentalists. It is not a
piece of rhetoric about a theoretical better future.
Instead, it is an essential and specific call to action that
has the potential to be the key global breakthrough of
our time. It can change the global paradigm of
development in a way that enables us to address the
interconnected security challenges we face in the world
today.
Pursuing this integrated response to our global
challenges presents unparalleled opportunities for
peoples across today’s developing world. The food we
need, the energy we generate, the minerals and other
commodities from which we grow our economies,
along with our forests and other land that can be the
drivers of climate solutions, are all largely in the
developing world. With the right international action,
the developing world can lead the globe in the creation
of the transformational shift we need to see.
Importantly, within the United Nations, we
already have many of the entities we need to solve
these problems in an integrated way. That realization
should motivate us to understand that by next year’s
United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development, we can start to make the progress that is
necessary.
But that means consistency in our efforts to
address all forms of insecurity. We need to support
peaceful peoples everywhere to assert their basic rights
to physical security and development. The global
response to the Arab Spring and other peace
movements across the Middle East has been
remarkable for its inconsistency. Guyana supports the
right of the Palestinian people to full statehood and
urges the acceleration of the negotiations to achieve
this. Palestinian rights and blood are as valuable and
important as those of people everywhere else. I urge all
Members to support the draft resolution when it comes
before this body.
Guyana was delighted to co-sponsor resolution
65/308 that resulted in the entry of South Sudan into
this General Assembly. But we need to do much more.
Guyana will be supportive of all peoples who struggle
for democracy and dignity.
This also means that we need to rapidly upgrade
our response to supporting development, food, energy
and resource security. We need to see the Doha trade
round not as some zero-sum game between the
developed and developing world, but as a critical
component to enable the world to meet the urgent
challenges that an increasingly prosperous, growing
population will present. We need to redouble our
efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals,
and to defeat non-communicable diseases. Guyana
therefore welcomes this week’s meeting on
non-communicable diseases and the adoption of the
Political Declaration (resolution 66/2, annex).
Finally, we need to move beyond the global
insanity that is our response to climate insecurity.
Existing pledges on greenhouse gas emissions under
the Copenhagen Accord will not contain global
temperature rises within limits that will avert
catastrophic climate change, and some States will face
extinction. Moreover, the anaemic delivery on financial
pledges made at Copenhagen and formalized in the
Cancún agreements is leading to a disastrous
breakdown in trust between the developed and
developing world. The prospects for reaching an
internationally legally binding agreement on climate
change at the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change in Durban, South Africa, would appear rather
bleak. There is therefore an urgent need for high-order
political leadership to re-energize the climate change
process and deliver credible results.
To address these challenges, the United Nations
and other international institutions need to modernize
fast, and the international system needs to correct the
inconsistencies between aid, trade and climate policies
as I have outlined. In part, this means making the
Security Council more democratic, transparent and
legitimate. Fifty-four African countries have no
permanent seat on the Council; neither do the
33 countries that comprise the Latin American and
Caribbean region. Guyana strongly supports early
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reform of the Security Council through an expansion in
both the permanent and non-permanent categories and
enhanced representation of developing countries.
Today’s developed world needs to catch up with
the realization that the world has changed, and it is in
its vital national interests to change its approach to
development issues. Food security is not just about
people in poor countries; prices in Europe and the
United States are rising too. Energy insecurity will hit
today’s developed countries and destroy their
competitiveness as rapidly as it will hit the developing
world. Resource insecurity is already driving up
imported inflation in many developed countries and
elsewhere. Climate insecurity could be the tipping
point for today’s Powers to be relegated to history, with
all the suffering that would entail for their peoples.
So the narrative is changing and I hope that we
will rise to the challenge. From now on, I will watch
the proceedings in this Hall from afar, but for all of my
invocations to the United Nations to do better, it
remains the place where noble ambitions are pursued. I
wish the United Nations and its Members all the best
for a secure, prosperous and socially just future. On
behalf of my country and people, I express our full
support for the Organization and for strengthening its
capacity to better fulfil the many mandates entrusted to
it.