What GPF is working on
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Food & Hunger
GPF has drafted a wide-ranging policy statement on food security for the NGO Working Group on Food and Hunger - to be presented to the UN General Assembly. The statement calls for action on land-grabbing, bio-fuels, speculation in food commodities, environmental degradation and other key issues. It calls for support for the smallholders farmers who produce most of the world's food, and for a transition to sustainable farming methods. NGO leaders working at the Committee on World Food Security in Rome have endorsed the statement, which will be circulated to the Assembly's Second Committee. We hope it will generate some fresh thinking by governments and push long-neglected issues into the UN's policy agenda. You can read the statement on GPF's website.
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Opening of the General Assembly
As world leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the 66th General Assembly in late September, motorcades swept past our office while security sharpshooters stood ominously on the roof of the GA Building across the street. Dozens of media trucks with their prominent uplink dishes symbolized the frenzy of reporting that usually captures only the most superficial celebrity aspect of things. GPF is often invited to give media interviews during this time, and we like to emphasize the deeper trends. One very visible trend: the world's distribution of power continues to change, as Brazil, India and South Africa (among others) have a steadily larger profile at the UN. The era of the "sole superpower" is clearly coming to an end. Another shift of note: multinational companies are present in force at the UN and keen to position their brand in a positive light. PepsiCo was promoting its work for "nutrition, while the giant energy companies were claiming to favor "sustainable energy for all."
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Peace & Security
During September, the NGO Working Group on the Security Council met with Ambassadors Vitaly Churkin of Russia, Pedro Serrano of the European Union, and Baso Sangqu of South Africa. Among the hot topics under discussion were the Palestinian membership bid at the UN, the future of Libya, and the debate over how to promote a peaceful and democratic transition in Syria.
Recently, GPF has been glad to learn that our spring 2011 initiative over illegal fishing by European and Asian fleets off the coast of Somalia has finally gained traction in the Council and in the African Union. Council members were slow to look at the social and economic roots of piracy and all too ready to deploy military force. Illegal fishing destroys the livelihoods of coastal fisherfolk and it deprives starving Somali's of an important source of protein. GPF has been working to raise the profile of this issue since 2009: see our blog posts on the topic here, here and here.
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Peacekeeping
In early September, GPF organized a meeting of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council with Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former head of the UN Department of Peacekeeping (DPKO) and one of the world's most respected experts on the subject. The meeting with Guéhenno took place amid serious difficulties in the UN's peacekeeping enterprise. The UN is facing budgetary cutbacks and troop contributing countries are not willing to send enough peacekeepers to implement the Security Council's ambitious mandates. Countries from the Global South have supplied most of the troops for UN operations over the past twenty years, while Western powers have been practicing a form of selective "peacekeeping," unilaterally using their forces in "coalitions of the willing" (without UN command and sometimes without UN endorsement) only when it is in their national interest. Peacekeeping faces a host of problems, including politicized mandates, lengthy missions without end, and bad conduct by peacekeeping personnel. To learn more about peacekeeping in recent years, see the tables and charts compiled by GPF and the newly-posted interview of Guéhenno by GPF's Catherine Defontaine.
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Highlights
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Food & Hunger
The NGO Working Group on Food & Hunger published a major statement ahead of the General Assembly's resolution on food security.
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Palestine at the UN
Legal scholar Karima Bennoune and Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi spoke at GPF's event on Palestine's membership bid at the UN.
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GPF Fall Team
GPF is joined this fall by Catherine Defontaine (France), Suzie Dershowitz (US), Moa Osterberg (Sweden) and Anahi Wiedenbrug (Argentina).
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 New GPF Logo
GPF New York and GPF Europe have a new logo!
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Recent Events
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Palestine
GPF hosted two meetings on Palestine in September, in the run-up to the Palestinian request for UN membership. The first event was a panel discussion on the politics of the bid, featuring Rashid Khalidi (Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University), Karima Bennoune (Professor of Law and at Rutgers University), and Benjamin Beit Hallahmi (Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa, in Israel). The panelists examined the long-running Palestine conflict, Israel's rejection of Palestinian statehood, and the legal ramifications of claims for state recognition. The speakers were wary of depicting the UN initiative as a cure-all, but they felt that bringing the issue to the UN could bring positive results, since it signifies a repudiation of the failed US-dominated negotiation process.
GPF also co-sponsored a luncheon discussion with Raji Sourani, the founder and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza. Sourani, who was making his first visit to the US in 11 years, spoke of his work and of the daily struggle of Palestinians to attain basic human rights.
Videos of Khalidi's and Sourani's presentations are available on the GPF website.
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Financial Transaction Tax
On September 22nd, GPF and UBUNTU Forum of Barcelona co-organized a panel discussion on the possibility of a world-wide Financial Transaction Tax. Speakers included senior diplomats and NGO representatives. The discussion explored the advantages of such a tax and how to implement it. A small tax on every transaction could generate a large revenue and might also slow the pace of frenzied speculative trading (as James Tobin first proposed). Such a flow of revenue could fund global health initiatives and poverty reduction measures. Panelists claimed that governments are close to adopting such a tax, though some countries with large financial sectors (the US and the UK especially) remain opposed. A FTT is no longer an NGO dream. Teams of experts are now working in key governments (including Brazil, France, Germany and Spain) to plan for implementation. GPF has long advocated for the introduction of global taxes, and published a major policy paper on this topic in 2002. NGO speakers warned that governments may try to hijack the tax revenue to fill the gap in national revenues. But with luck and pressure, some of collected funds may help promote global priorities.
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Gross National Happiness
GPF's Anahi Wiedenbrug and Alex Post attended a private event organized by the Prime Minister of Bhutan to consider "Gross National Happiness" as an indicator of national social progress and well-being. For the past century, Gross National Product (GNP) has been the shrine of economists looking to measure countries' success and citizens' welfare. But today, GNP is no longer in vogue and its shortcomings are well-understood. When UNDP's Mahbub al-Haq first constructed the Human Development Index in 1990, he wanted to exclude GNP entirely. Today, the search for alternative measures has far broader backing and both the French and British governments have explored the matter. Bhutan, a tiny kingdom in the Himalayas, argues that it has a unique perspective in the matter.
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