UNITED NATIONS CENTRE FOR HUMAN SETTLEMENTS (HABITAT) - CENTRE DES NATIONS UNIES POUR LES ETABLISSEMENTS HUMAINS - CENTRO DE LAS NACIONES UNIDAS PARA LOS ASENTAMIENTOS HUMANOS

Mr. Wally N'Dow, Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT)

Today, this Conference has a new element of urgency added to it by the historic change now taking place in our human settlements. This change is related to two basic questions. The questions are: how will we all, all of our billions live in the twenty-first century? Where will we all live?

One of the most important issues discussed at HABITAT II - the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements held in Istanbul, Turkey this past June - was how the world would prepare itself for improving human settlement shelter in nations large and small, and prepare itself better for a new urban world in which we will be living just a few years from now.

Just a few years from now, more than half of all of humanity will be crowded into urban centres, most of them in the poorer developing countries. This is a phenomenon with an obviously powerful impact on the very subjects at the heart of our discussions here. How do we enhance food security worldwide? What shape and what effort? What will be the quality of our attack on world hunger? This impact will be compounded even more by a parallel phenomenon of the organization of poverty and the de-feminisation of poverty.

The world has never seen the likes of this unprecedented demographic shift that is now underway, in the North as well as in the South. Nor has it ever known as critical a challenge as the one now confronting us, the challenge of finding the technology - as was said earlier - that will complement the human factor in food production as we search for new directions for human welfare. This is the dilemma made all the greater by the millions today that we know are voting with their feet, fleeing the economically stagnant countryside, fleeing these lands and these pastures that can no longer feed and support these people and their livestock, that can no longer create livelihoods. To find jobs in growing urban centres, jobs that for the most part do not exist.

It is also the dilemma that we confront created by millions fleeing tribal war, ethnic war and strife. It is the dilemma created by these millions still, who are fleeing from their environmentally degraded countryside, bringing only their hope but also, surely, their pain and their hunger to the cities of our world. It is additionally the dilemma created by the expansion of organization into farmland today. It is the dilemma that we face as we confront the reality of the thirsty city, water shortages, affecting nations large and small. This competition for water between the expanding mega-cities, urban transport, agriculture and the invasion of fragile ecosystems by agriculture.

This combination has led to a unique phenomenon in our day. Today in many countries of our world governments are at war with their own people. At war because of the socio-political struggles in the city, at war because of the struggles in the countryside for life and livelihood.

This combination of environmental deterioration, food insecurity and unmanageable human settlement is destroying nations. This combination of 800 million hungry people and 1.5 billion people in inadequate or totally absent shelters will continue to destroy nations.

Even in countries with an outward tranquillity the situation is volcanic. Witness what we have known by terrorism in the megacities of the North. Witness the social catastrophes of drugs, crime, international crime and disease.

What then is the impact of organization on our conversation? What is the ecological footprint of the 35 or so megacities of our world on their national hinterland and on the global hinterland? What is the impact of a big megacity on its nation in terms of the fibre, the food and the materials it needs to metabolize itself and dispose of its waste? For those of us who are dealing with these problems of organization and human settlement, one of our main expectations of this Food Summit is the shaping of future food policies that will help reduce rural and urban poverty and thereby increase social equity, social integration and stability. That means that we must fight on two fronts: fight at the front of the village and fight at the front of the urban settlement, fight nationally and fight internationally.

We at HABITAT also look for new solutions to the problems of war-ravaged societies, yet contributing to the teeming millions who are rushing to save their lives into the city. We hope we can work for their reconstruction, for their rehabilitation as partners with United Nations sister agencies, UNDP, the World Bank, FAO, UNHCR, WFP and IFAD. Something we are doing in many parts of the world today. We also hope we can continue to work with NGOs, women's groups, parliamentarians and others concerned with the formulation and implementation of strategies to provide victims of war with desperately needed food, shelter and physical infrastructure so that they can resume their lives and their livelihood.

Governments cannot do all of this alone, cities cannot do the job alone. As global plans of action adopted in all the conferences, including HABITAT, acknowledge as ever before, the international community will need the cooperation of the entire range of civil society. NGOs with tremendous vitality today, the private sector who create the jobs and the livelihoods, local authorities who are captains of their cities, these towns and these villages. This combination partnership coupled with enablement, coupled with sharing of good success stories, best practices, coupled with ways to measure success, indicators. This is one way that we can open up the United Nations system agencies, including their governance, to policy formulation, to the partners, NGOs, local authorities and others. This is a very urgent call and it fits very squarely with the concepts that are advanced in this agenda of food security.

What are we talking about basically in these series? We are talking about sustainable human development which today has to be the new name for peace. When we put together the Women's Conference, the Children's Summit, the Human Rights Conference, the Population Conference, the Social Summit, we are writing indeed the human development agenda of the international community. A human development agenda based on the new definition of human security including food security, shelter security, education security and health security.

This is a major part of our challenge, the old definitions of security, based on the protection of national boundaries and the use of armies and police forces and jails, have not worked. This is very self-evident today. For all of us who have been involved in the preparation of these media conferences under the aegis of the United Nations, these conferences, finally, are not mere meetings. They may yet prove to be in our day and at this stage in the human journey, humankind's way of negotiating its own survival.

I wish to congratulate the Secretary-General, Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for launching this great conversation, this great conversation to take care of this great disorder under heaven - I think that was the way the Chinese characterized it a few years ago. I also wish to congratulate finally Mr. Jacques Diouf and his colleagues in FAO and all of you partners, particularly the governments, for making this contribution to this global conversation and this great effort.