Carol Bellamy, former New York politician, Wall Street lawyer and investment banker, and former director of the Peace Corps, was President Clinton’s choice to head UNICEF. She has just finished the maximum ten years allowed for her UNICEF position. As the US is the single-largest contributor to UNICEF, Washington is traditionally given the right to nominate an American to lead this UN agency. President Bush is sending to the New York based UNICEF his former Secretary of Agriculture, Ms. Ann Veneman. Her term starts May 1, 2005 and we wish her all the best in her new job, though we have serious reservations based on the way she handled the US Department of Agriculture.SustainabiliTank.info has a button named “Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease”. This button looked in articles dated December 25, 2003 and January 12, 2004 at Ms. Veneman’s tenure at USDA in order to show how zealotry does destroy the very interest that it tries to promote.

Ms. Veneman was prior to her appointment to USDA the head of the National Cattleman’s Business Association (NCBA), the main Washington lobby for the beef industry. She brought over to USDA her entourage from NCBA and as a result the office did little regarding the needed safeguards from mad cow disease. When confronted, inadvertently, by the first published case of the disease in the US, it became obvious that something was wrong in that department. In effect she harmed rather then helped the American meat packers. We looked into this because we felt that something from this could be learned about failed policies in the US energy policy sector. The SustainabiliTank.info button named “Reporting from Washington DC” has articles dealing with Mr. Spencer Abrams, former Secretary of the Department of Energy (”The Missing Ersatz US Energy Policy” - October 1, 2004), and Mr. Donald L. Evans, former Secretary of Commerce (”The Future of the Fuels Industry” - September 16, 2004). All three secretaries are now “former” because of weaknesses found in the way they applied their zealotry to their jobs. We can only hope that Ms. Veneman, who was presented to the UN Press as a person who “has had experience in running a large organization”, has indeed learned something from that experience.

UNICEF is one of the brighter stars among the UN agencies. Ms. Bellamy is leaving an agency that can say child mortality has decreased since 1995 by 60% and its budget has doubled. She gave a farewell press conference at the UN on Wednesday April 27, 2005. The Christian Science Monitor on-line  csmonitor.com) says that she used a rights-based approach to her charges - demanding that countries meet their obligations, she did not ask them merely to be charitable towards children. That is something we hope Ms. Veneman will continue.

Ms. Bellamy, touring the world, used to wield the 1989 “Convention on the Rights of the Child”. As the world’s leading advocate for children, Ms. Bellamy demanded from 192 signatories of the convention the right for children to grow up - “in health, dignity, and peace” - free of conflict, HIV/AIDS, and poverty, and protected from violence, exploitation, and abuse. For her handling only immunizations was not enough. She wanted to provide education to the children, boys and girls, and to their mothers. As an investment banker she pushed the notion that providing women and girls with access to better healthcare and education may drive economies toward prosperity. She was just at the cutting edge of Sustainable Development. Was this all gravy? No! - when I asked her at the press conference - what areas she would have wanted to deal with that she did not get to touch and she would recommend for her successor? What about the environment and questions like air pollution induced diseases or something like lead in the air of inner cities (after all lead compounds in the air were determined as decreasing learning capacity)? Her answer was that in different countries there are different needs, she would always do what the country thought most important to them, and she would not spread too thin - this is why UNICEF was not involved in lead.

Despite above, Ms. Belamy has nevertheless great achievements to point at, and when groups like “the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute” accused her for teaching the health and economic benefits of “birth spacing” - for women not to have more than one child every two years - or for making available the “morning after” pill to refugee women who were the victims of rape, she should proudly display those complaints as badges of honor.

At a press conference in February, Ms. Veneman when nominated to UNICEF, was asked if she would continue to emphasize primary and secondary education for girls, she said - “I don’t come with any broad agenda with regard to those or any other issue … I don’t believe these issues are relevant to the mission of UNICEF”. We will thus have to wait and see her own set of priorities.

Back on March 21, 2005, my friend Benny Avni reported in the New York Sun, from Turtle Bay, “Veneman Is An Anomaly”. He saw the world in red and blue - “As Republicans mobilize to promote democracy around the world, Democrats are influencing the world body at Turtle Bay”. This was, in all honesty, the worst article from Benny’s computer I ever saw. In McCarthy style, he dug up a group of “Democrats” that surround Kofi Annan - the likes of Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton, the British national Mark Malloch Brown, Jeffrey Sachs, James Wolfensohn and Richard Holbrooke, In this context he sees in the Venneman and Wolfowitz appointments a welcome change - I guess Republican swallows building a nest at Turtle Bay. SustainabiliTank.info clearly recognizes the President’s right to put in position people of his choice, and found positive sides to the Wolfowitz and even the Bolton appointments, but Veneman is something different. She was the unsuccessful head of a department in Washington and had been removed by the President. Sending her to the UN may not show that she has the President’s ear, and Benny quotes Mr. Annan who said “Obviously, relationships and contacts in Washington will be helpful”. If this is based on Washington’s aversion to sex education, as Benny says, and “Washington prefers abstinence”, this tenure is going to be indeed an anomaly at the UN; otherwise this may actually rather show disregard of the UN altogether - something I am not sure yet that the UN deserves ahead of the Secretary General’s expressed interest in reform. Benny Avni says that “Washington’s current power brokers, however, are unlikely to see Mr. Annan’s new reform plan as sufficient”. I doubt that removing sex education from a UN agency is a reform in the positive direction, neither will be a change in the food pyramid to favor beef and milk.