General Assembly: Meetings Coverage

Too often seen as a “lost cause”, the world’s drylands — home to 2 billion people — must be placed higher on the international agenda as poor land management, climate change and conflict threatened to jeopardize hard-won gains in painstaking national efforts to reduce poverty and improve development prospects, top United Nations and other officials said today during the High-level Meeting of the General Assembly to address desertification, land degradation and drought.

Participants in this afternoon’s round table discussion on non-communicable diseases stressed the urgency of international cooperation to boost national capabilities in prevention, policy formulation, monitoring and analysis, as well as building health-care systems.

Non-communicable diseases were quickly becoming a threat to socio-economic development in the world’s poorest countries, speakers participating in the first round table of the General Assembly’s high-level meeting on the subject said this morning.

Proclaiming the spread of non-communicable diseases a socio-economic and development challenge of “epidemic proportions,” Governments today pledged to work with the United Nations to adopt before the end of 2012 targets to combat heart disease, cancers, diabetes and lung disease and to devise voluntary policies that cut smoking and slashed the high salt, sugar and fat content in foods that caused them.

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) met this morning to fill vacant positions on its Bureau for the upcoming sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.

The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) met this morning to fill vacant positions on its Bureau for the upcoming sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.

The First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) met this morning to fill vacant positions on its Bureau for the upcoming sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.

The United Nations General Assembly this morning adopted the agenda for its sixty-sixth session during a meeting which required two recorded votes to allow representatives of Libya’s National Transitional Council to stand for the strife-torn North African country in the world body’s work for the coming year.

“We come together at a critical juncture,” said the incoming General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser, as he opened the 193‑member body’s sixty-sixth session with a call to action on the United Nations to rethink the way it did business in the wake of ongoing global economic turmoil, popular protests that were upending once-stable Governments and the seemingly unending raft of natural hazards and man-made disasters.

While commending Member States for making headway on the major themes on the agenda of the General Assembly’s sixty-fifth session dealing with poverty reduction, global governance, a green economy and sustainable development, Joseph Deiss, the world body’s outgoing President today warned “our commitment in the name of the values of the United Nations has sometimes been too weak or too late”.