Why Is the Un Important

Why is the UN important?

Ralph J. Bunche, American Political scientist and 1950 Nobel Peace Prize winner once said, “The United Nations exists not merely to preserve the peace but also to make change – even radical change – possible without violent upheaval”. In addition, American Statesman John Bolton argued that “There’s no such thing as the United Nations. If the UN secretary building in New York lost ten floors, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. The conflicting ideas regarding the United Nations have been present since its founding, however the structure of the Un has not.

The United Nations is an international organization comprised of one hundred and ninety-three member nations, setup in 1945, in succession to the League of Nations, which were both intended to promote peace and international cooperation.

The United Nations have been credited with negotiating one hundred and seventy-two peaceful settlements that have ended regional conflicts, they have enabled people in over forty-five separate countries to participate in free and democratic elections, the UN has further provided Safe Drinking Water available to 1.3 billion people in rural areas during the last decade and the preservation of numerous historically important, cultural and architectural sites across the globe due to the efforts of UNESCO, international conventions have also been adopted to preserve cultural property. The list goes on.

Additionally, the United Nations is well known for its peacekeeping forces and interventions in member countries to assist people in times of crisis and impoverishment. Right now, there are approximately 800 million people who do not have enough food to eat. Although this repugnant factor is most upsetting the United Nations seems to have addressed this global issue – the UN’s world food program feeds around 80 million people a year and serves around 12.6 billion rations of food to emaciated citizens around the globe. Furthermore, they often operate in conflict-ridden countries and war zones to provide humanitarian support where it is most needed.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) serves both developed and developing nations as a neutral forum where members meet as equals to negotiate agreements and policies regarding food and agriculture. Australia was a founding member the FAO in 1945 after the end of the second world war and has participated actively collecting statistical data and exchanging information on agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries since. As a major world food producer and agriculture trading nation, Australia has a strong interest in the codification of agricultural and food standards, the facilitation of international trade, the sustainable management of fisheries and forestry resources and in monitoring surplus disposals and food aid transactions.

However, the foreign-aid industry had a bad news cycle around the time of the establishment of the WFP and FAO were coming into the light. First, British newspapers were consumed by a spat between the British Broadcasting Corp, and Live Aid founder Bob Geldof over a BBC report that tens of millions of dollars of aid to Ethiopia during the 1984-1985 famine were used for arms dealing. As well as a more current and equally egregious scandal involving the world’s largest humanitarian agency has spun out of Ethiopia’s neighboring country: Somalia. A United Nations report released last year, paints a damning portrait of the World Food Programme’s operations there: an estimated 50 percent of food delivered by the U.N. agency is essentially being stolen – not only by the WFP’s own personnel and contractors, but also the Somalian armed militias, some of whom are radical Islamists.

Somalia is not the first crisis for the agency. These new allegations join a series of recent missteps that have brought the WFP and other legislated UN affiliated organizations under scrutiny for their roles in aid missions around the world, from North Korea to the Horn of Africa.

What is going on within the WFP?

It is clear to see, that however many ‘successes’ they have credited themselves with, there is a strong debate between the importance that the UN actually presumes it has and the actions that have proved itself to be worthy. The promotion of “global” peace has not even been close to the realm of possibility in which the United Nations was created to push for. Time and time again the UN has tried to solve the conflicts and struggles for reconciliation between many countries across the globe, yes, some of these conflicts were solved to some extent. However, for such a large and global organization the list of failures in the sector of the promotion of peace is worryingly large, and most distressingly: ever increasing.