Guyana, 2011

Allow me first to convey to

the President my warmest congratulations on his

election to guide the work of the sixty-sixth session of

the General Assembly. I have no doubt that under his

leadership, Qatar will be instrumental in the service of

his presidency, and, indeed, in that of the Assembly as

a whole, as we face the challenging times ahead. I also

recognize the service of his predecessor and wish to

record our appreciation for that service. To our

Secretary-General, I offer my delegation’s

congratulations on the renewal of his mandate, an act

that bears testimony to the confidence placed in him by

the Member States of this body.

This is the last time that I will address this great

Hall as President of my country. Before the end of the

year, I will be proud to be the first President of Guyana

to demit office under the constitutional term limits that

I signed into law in the early days of my presidency.

Inevitably, that milestone has caused me to look back

on the changes that have taken place in this body since

I first stood here 12 years ago. Three things strike me

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as I reflect on the role of the United Nations over those

12 years.

The first is that the central point that I and others

have repeatedly made from this rostrum stays as true

today as it was when we first articulated it. The core

point is that, while the values that inform the work of

the United Nations and our Member States — the

values of peace, equality and justice — are timeless,

they are of limited use unless we, as the United Nations

and as individual Member States, draw on them to

catalyse consistent, meaningful and practical responses

to the contemporary changing challenges that our

peoples face.

The second point that strikes me is how utterly

different today’s contemporary challenges actually are

when compared with those of just 12 years ago, not to

mention those of the 1940s, when the United Nations

was founded. The rise of China, India, Brazil and other

developing countries is transforming the globe for the

better. Billions of people have been lifted out of

poverty; new businesses are generating millions of

jobs, growth and capital; and there is once again

genuine intellectual debate about the right way to

embed rights and justice at the core of the global

governance structure.

However, the emergence of those great Powers is

happening in a totally different way to how Powers

emerged in the past. They are emerging in a world that

is interconnected through instant communications

capabilities and globalized trading and financial

systems. What we are witnessing is unlike anything

that has happened before, and few communities and no

country on the planet are not impacted, almost in real

time, by those changes as they happen.

That presents the United Nations and its Member

States with a great opportunity to realize our values

and to secure the global peace, justice and security to

which we aspire. But to do so, we must face up to the

opportunities of interconnectedness with responses that

are interconnected. Our record on international

collective action in recent years is not good.

That leads me to my third point, which is that the

search for justice and the achievement of rights for all

require us to broaden our traditional understanding of

security. We must struggle to achieve rights in a new

way and, as many have said before me, alongside the

physical security challenge, there are many other

aspects to human security and the realization of rights.

I think that there are four other elements of security, in

particular, that we need to properly understand.

First is the challenge of food security. We are

heading for 8 billion, then 9 billion people. Rising

prosperity means that those people want greater

amounts of, and more nutritious, food. By current

trends, we need 100 million hectares of new land by

2020 to meet that demand. How do we do that and

avoid excessive price increases and volatility?

Second is the challenge of energy security. As the

world gets richer, our demand for energy increases

massively. We are likely to demand 36 per cent more

energy by 2035. How do we generate the energy

needed to meet such demand in a way that helps people

everywhere to develop and does not choke off

economic growth through high prices caused by energy

scarcity?

Third is the challenge of resource security. If we

are to alleviate poverty, countries need to develop. And

if countries are to develop, they need minerals and

other commodities. China alone accounts for more than

a third of the demand for many of the most important

global commodities, and countries across the world,

most notably in South America and Africa, can supply

them. How do we help global development by sourcing

such minerals and using them efficiently and justly?

Fourth is the challenge of climate security. If we

are to avert the biggest economic and social

catastrophe ever seen, we must stabilize our planet’s

climate. At the absolute limit, that means stabilizing

global temperatures at a maximum of two degrees

above pre-industrial levels. Yet we are on track towards

perhaps a four- or five-degree rise, according to the

United Nations Environment Programme. The disaster

that this could represent is beyond anyone’s

comprehension. And the fact that we are not treating it

as an emergency will be viewed by history as the

biggest derogation of responsibility by societies and

Governments to ever take place. How can we rapidly

change that situation before we run out of time?

Those four challenges represent both

opportunities and difficulties. The difficulties are

obvious, but they are opportunities in the sense that we

have enough land, innovation and human ingenuity to

feed the world. We have enough clean energy potential

to power future prosperity. We have enough resources

to provide the foundations for economic growth. We

know that to avert climate change means using fossil

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fuels and land in the right way. Once we start realizing

those opportunities, we can create new platforms for

peace, development and physical security.

That sounds an impossible task, but I would

argue that it is not. There are solutions to enable those

opportunities to be grasped today, and the United

Nations can provide the platform for making the

changes that are needed. We can do that if we draw

motivation from the realization that the idea of

integrated sustainable development, where we optimize

our response to the interlinked security challenges, is

not some abstraction for environmentalists. It is not a

piece of rhetoric about a theoretical better future.

Instead, it is an essential and specific call to action that

has the potential to be the key global breakthrough of

our time. It can change the global paradigm of

development in a way that enables us to address the

interconnected security challenges we face in the world

today.

Pursuing this integrated response to our global

challenges presents unparalleled opportunities for

peoples across today’s developing world. The food we

need, the energy we generate, the minerals and other

commodities from which we grow our economies,

along with our forests and other land that can be the

drivers of climate solutions, are all largely in the

developing world. With the right international action,

the developing world can lead the globe in the creation

of the transformational shift we need to see.

Importantly, within the United Nations, we

already have many of the entities we need to solve

these problems in an integrated way. That realization

should motivate us to understand that by next year’s

United Nations Conference on Sustainable

Development, we can start to make the progress that is

necessary.

But that means consistency in our efforts to

address all forms of insecurity. We need to support

peaceful peoples everywhere to assert their basic rights

to physical security and development. The global

response to the Arab Spring and other peace

movements across the Middle East has been

remarkable for its inconsistency. Guyana supports the

right of the Palestinian people to full statehood and

urges the acceleration of the negotiations to achieve

this. Palestinian rights and blood are as valuable and

important as those of people everywhere else. I urge all

Members to support the draft resolution when it comes

before this body.

Guyana was delighted to co-sponsor resolution

65/308 that resulted in the entry of South Sudan into

this General Assembly. But we need to do much more.

Guyana will be supportive of all peoples who struggle

for democracy and dignity.

This also means that we need to rapidly upgrade

our response to supporting development, food, energy

and resource security. We need to see the Doha trade

round not as some zero-sum game between the

developed and developing world, but as a critical

component to enable the world to meet the urgent

challenges that an increasingly prosperous, growing

population will present. We need to redouble our

efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals,

and to defeat non-communicable diseases. Guyana

therefore welcomes this week’s meeting on

non-communicable diseases and the adoption of the

Political Declaration (resolution 66/2, annex).

Finally, we need to move beyond the global

insanity that is our response to climate insecurity.

Existing pledges on greenhouse gas emissions under

the Copenhagen Accord will not contain global

temperature rises within limits that will avert

catastrophic climate change, and some States will face

extinction. Moreover, the anaemic delivery on financial

pledges made at Copenhagen and formalized in the

Cancún agreements is leading to a disastrous

breakdown in trust between the developed and

developing world. The prospects for reaching an

internationally legally binding agreement on climate

change at the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to

the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change in Durban, South Africa, would appear rather

bleak. There is therefore an urgent need for high-order

political leadership to re-energize the climate change

process and deliver credible results.

To address these challenges, the United Nations

and other international institutions need to modernize

fast, and the international system needs to correct the

inconsistencies between aid, trade and climate policies

as I have outlined. In part, this means making the

Security Council more democratic, transparent and

legitimate. Fifty-four African countries have no

permanent seat on the Council; neither do the

33 countries that comprise the Latin American and

Caribbean region. Guyana strongly supports early

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reform of the Security Council through an expansion in

both the permanent and non-permanent categories and

enhanced representation of developing countries.

Today’s developed world needs to catch up with

the realization that the world has changed, and it is in

its vital national interests to change its approach to

development issues. Food security is not just about

people in poor countries; prices in Europe and the

United States are rising too. Energy insecurity will hit

today’s developed countries and destroy their

competitiveness as rapidly as it will hit the developing

world. Resource insecurity is already driving up

imported inflation in many developed countries and

elsewhere. Climate insecurity could be the tipping

point for today’s Powers to be relegated to history, with

all the suffering that would entail for their peoples.

So the narrative is changing and I hope that we

will rise to the challenge. From now on, I will watch

the proceedings in this Hall from afar, but for all of my

invocations to the United Nations to do better, it

remains the place where noble ambitions are pursued. I

wish the United Nations and its Members all the best

for a secure, prosperous and socially just future. On

behalf of my country and people, I express our full

support for the Organization and for strengthening its

capacity to better fulfil the many mandates entrusted to

it.