PRESS BRIEFING BY UN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME ADMINISTRATOR

In the midst of ongoing efforts in the political and humanitarian areas in Afghanistan, there was a new and equally vital challenge -– to structure a recovery and reconstruction programme that would support those efforts, Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told correspondents at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon.

Mr. Malloch Brown, recently asked by the Secretary-General to take on the responsibility of leading the early recovery efforts in Afghanistan, said there would be a series of international consultations in that regard, including a meeting tomorrow in Washington D.C., co-hosted by the United States and Japan, with donors and international organizations.  That would most likely be followed by a more formal donors meeting in Tokyo in January.

Also, he continued, next week in Islamabad, the UNDP, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank will hold a three-day session in which some 200 Afghans would be participating to assess recovery and reconstruction needs.  The following week, in Europe, the Afghan Support Group, under Germany's chairmanship, would have one of its regular meetings – held every six months -- to look at Afghanistan's needs.

The machinery of international meetings was well under way, and it was important to capture and channel the current energy into a "bankable series of commitments" to Afghan reconstruction, he said.  The United Nations had huge on-the-ground capacity in Afghanistan.  There were 2,200 national Afghan colleagues working for the funds and programmes of the system, including 700 for the UNDP, 1,000 for the World Food Programme (WFP), as well as large numbers working for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Additionally, there were very large numbers of able, skilled Afghans in the refugee camps or working with non-governmental organizations in those camps, he added.  "So, the pool of human Afghan talent that we can deploy to begin moving things forward were enormous", he said.

The critical issue was how to get things going, he continued.  In that regard, the first priority was "quick impact projects" or the rapid re-engagement of community development activities.  The UNDP had been doing $40 million to

$50 million a year of development activities at the village level in Afghanistan, helped by other United Nations partners.  It now intended to expand those programmes to more areas.

Second, he added, the municipal infrastructure of the country had taken a terrible hit, not only as a consequence of the bombing campaign, but also as a result of deterioration over many years.  Quick work programmes to rehabilitate the municipal infrastructure were critical in the cities.  Third, there was a major food deficit in the country, due to the drought.  In addition to the

52,000 tonnes of food a month that the WFP hoped to ship in, it was important to

urgently rehabilitate the agricultural economy.  That would also require modest public works efforts to support irrigation.

Beyond those immediate recovery needs at the grass-roots level, he said that there was an equally critical task of beginning to restore nascent national institutions and to start building the human capacity among Afghans of those who could be the future staff of government ministries.

Asked for an estimate of how much the reconstruction would cost,

Mr. Malloch Brown said that it was premature to make such an estimate.  However, he was anxious to give some early estimates within the next few days, based on the costs of other comparable reconstruction operations.  He believed a good parallel case would be that of Mozambique, a similarly poor country destroyed by many years of conflict.  The cost of that five-year operation was $6.5 billion.

Also on cost, he said it was extremely important to get a five-year plan covering both recovery and reconstruction, and to get now as close as possible to bankable commitments for the five years, because the real costs would come in years three, four and five.  In the early years of such operations, severe capacity constraints meant that there were limits to the amount of money that could be well spent.  In the latter years, there was the rehabilitation of major infrastructure and the construction of new infrastructure.  At that point, the capital costs soared.  It was also at that point that political commitment declined.

He added that foreigners would be less visible than in past operations, as a result of the belief of both the Secretary-General and his Special Representative that an Afghan-led recovery operation was the goal.  Hence, the foreigners would be playing a more subdued role.  At the same time, there was a "clear appetite" across Afghan society for accepting foreign help.

On what he expected of the Washington meeting, he said that it would be a useful effort by the United States and Japan to start a process of rapidly clarifying thinking and trying to arrive at a consensus in terms of scale, approaches and mechanisms for recovery and reconstruction.  More donors at the table were needed, as well as more Afghans, before definitive decisions could be taken on the recovery and reconstruction agenda.

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