Humanitarian issues

On Saturday, accompanied by Pakistan’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, the Secretary-General travelled to Balochistan, Larkana and Sukkur, in Sindh Province, and met with a group of women and men who abandoned everything to help their neighbours reach safety as their houses flooded. He said he had never seen climate carnage on this scale.

The General Assembly on 8 September decided to establish a United Nations Office on Youth Affairs. The new office will give the Organization a dedicated office to support the 1.2 billion young people in the world today.

The World Food Programme’s first humanitarian shipment of grain from Ukraine, delivered under the Black Sea Grain Initiative, has arrived in Ethiopia and will be distributed in the coming weeks. The shipment will support one month of assistance to over 1.5 million people who have been displaced by drought and conflict.

The United Nations Resident Coordinator in China today said he is deeply saddened by the tragic loss of lives and destruction caused by the 5 September earthquake in Sichuan Province. He said the Organization stands ready to assist and support the Government of China’s valiant rescue efforts.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today said that world food commodity prices dipped for a fifth month in a row. The FAO Food Price Index averaged 138 points in August, down 1.9 per cent from July although remaining 7.9 per cent above its value a year before.

In Thailand, the United Nations is helping authorities improve green technologies. The Organization is partnering with nearly 300 companies to cut food waste by up to 10 per cent.

In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, where 1.3 million Palestinian children will be returning to school this week, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator there issued a statement today in which she said she is concerned that, since the beginning of the year, 20 children were killed in the West Bank.

In Ukraine, a convoy, organized by the United Nations and its partners, recently reached Toretsk in eastern Donetsk Oblast on 26 August. The convoy delivered 56 tons of food and other items for 2,000 people living close to the front line and who are under shelling.

Outlining the deepening humanitarian crisis in Syria and the threat of escalating violence, the Special Envoy for that country told the Security Council today he regretted that, during two years of frozen front lines, the international community had not seized upon the window provided by that relative calm to build a credible political process.

Restrictions on fundamental human rights and freedoms — especially for women and girls — are exacerbating the bleak humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, senior United Nations officials told the Security Council today, as members diverged over the international community’s optimal level of engagement with the Taliban in light of such repression.