Secretary-General's visit to West Africa.

/He hoped that "the notion of multilateral co-operation, predicted on political premises, will regain its place and thus free the developing world as a whole, and Africa in particular, from the shackles of tensions between the great Powers". /Mr. Perez de Cuellar gave these views in a detailed statement to the Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria, delivered on 25 January, at the midpoint of his trip. The Secretary-General described the situation in Africa as "a full-fledged emergency, requiring the attention and action of the international community as a whole". /Mr Perez de Cuellar, from 17 January through 4 February, visited Mali, Niger, Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta and Senegal. In each country, he met with the Head of State and discussed economic problems of the region and the country. /Accompanying Mr. Perez de Cuellar were Adebayo Adedeji, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), and Abdulrahim Abby Farah, Under Secretary General for Special Political Questions and Co-ordinator, Special Economic Assistance Programmes. Meetings were held between national experts and United Nations experts to discuss specific problems, in particular those caused by drought and desertification. /The following is a brief summary of the Secretary-General's activities in West Africa. /*mali (17-19 January): Mr. Perez de Cuellar met with President Moussa Traore in Bamako the capital. He also visited the ancient city of Tombouctou (Timbuktu) in central Mali, where he viewed the effects of drought and desertification. /Niger (19-21 january): Discussions were held in Niamey, the capital, with the President of Niger, General Seyni Kountche. Mr perez de Cuellar visited the Agrhymet Centre, which administers hydrology and meteorology progammes related to agriculture, a project of the Interstate Committee for Relief of Drought in the Sahel, undertaken with assistance from the World Meteorological Organization of the United nations (FAO). /The Secretary-General also visited the Office of cereal products of Niger, where stocks of locally grown cereals and foreign products are kept for distribution when necessary. /Benin (21-23 January): The Secretary-General met in Cotonou with Mathileu Kerekou, President of Benin, who gave him an economic memorandum on the short-term and medium-term socio-economic problems of the country. In it, he stressed the pressing needs of the country to overcome the disastrous consequences of the 1983 drought, especially with respect to food, animal feed and water resources development. Benin urgently needs 32,000 tons of cereals, and $1.3 million for rehabilitation of livestock. /The President appealed to the Secretary-General to sensitize the international community to the need to mobilize external resources for financing the special economic assistance programme for Benin, adopted in 1981 by the General Assembly, as well as the country programme for Benin presented during a roundtable conference organized in March 1983. Only about 20 per cent of the two programmes have so far received the necessary funding. /The Secretary-General visited the Centre for Agro-pedology, a project jointly managed by the FAO and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in co-operation with the Benin Government. The Centre prepares maps of fertile soils and selects various soil types for culture. The Secretary-General also visited waste and producing bio-gas and energy. /Nigeria (23-26 January): The Secretary-General and Major-General Mohammed Buhari, Nigerian Head of State and Commander of the Armed Forces, met in Lagos to discuss in general terms assistance to developing countries. /The Secretary-General stressed that the international community and donor countries could not impose a rigid formula for aid to developing countries, but must listen to the views of African Governments and devise solutions for each country In a parallel way, developing countries must ensure that their structures are strong enough to receive aid and must make a national effort to solve their problems instead of relying solely on external aid. /In other meetings in Lagos, the Secretary-General stressed the need for developing countries to formulate a co-ordinated approach to common problems. /On 25 January, the Secretary-General flew to Maiduguri, capital of Borno, one of the Nigerian states affected by drought. The party, using a low-flying aircraft, viewed the effects of desertification on the Sahelian zone of Borno, in particular the formation of sand dunes. /In meetings with local experts, Mr. Perez de Cuellar was informed that the 1983 level of rainfall was at the lowest for the entire century. Problems of food production, seed shortages and cattle losses were also discussed. /He was also briefed on the South Chad irrigation project of the Chad Basin Development Authority, which covers the entire state of Borno and part of northern Gongola--a total area of 136,000 square kilometers, 15 per cent of the total land area of Nigeria. /Togo (26-29 January): In Lome, the Secretary-General met with General Gnassinbe Eyadema, President of Togo. He also toured the agricultural region north of Lome, viewing coffee fields where trees had been destroyd because of lack of water. /At Avetonou, he saw experiments aimed at raising cattle resistant to the tsetse fly. He visited a palm oil factory at Agou, which was receiving aid from the European Economic Community, as well as model cocoa and coffee farms, the National School for Agriculture at Tove; and the handicraft centre at kpalime, all receiving funds from UNDP and the ECA. /On 28 January, the Secretary-General addressed the Union of Togolese People and members of the Togolese Government at the House of congress. /"In pursuing...action to alert the international comunity to the grave economic situation of Africa and the overriding need for concerted international action to improve the situation, we must neither underestimate the importance of internal measures nor overlook the significance of the national efforts which the Africa States have made and are continuing to make both individually and collectively", he said. /In a meeting with local experts, the possibility of United Nations assistance in the construction of small dams regulate irrigation in drought stricken zones was discussed. /Ivory Coast (29-31 January): On 29 January, Mr Perez de Cuellar met President Felix Houphouet-boigny in the new capital city of Yamoussokro. The Secretary-General, in a speech at a dinner on 30 January hosted by the Ivorian Foreign Minister, said: "Morality and interest...urge us to take action in order to close gaps which tend spontaneoudly to grow wider. Initiative is naturally more difficult in time of crisis, since sacrifices are then more painful. But that is also the time when it proves to be most necessary." On another occasion, in Abidjan, he said Africa could be "the continent of the future if it is allowed to become a continent of peace and development". /On 31 January, he met with Wila D. Mung'omba, President of the African Bank for Development, which has its headquarters in Abidjan. The Bank President thanked the Secretary-General for highlighting the African crisis, and thus the "magnitude of the task confronting the Bank in its efforts to improve the standard of living in Africa". /The Secretary-General said he had undertaken a "crusade in which all countries have to make a tremendous effort to help Africa and, at the same time, we have to ask our African brothers to put their house in order, so to speak, and present a common front to the rest of the world". /Upper Volta (31 January-2 February): On 31 January, the Secretary-General arrived in Ouagadougou, where there he raised the United Nations flag at the newly-named United Nations Square. He met with Thomas Sankara, President of Upper Volta. /Mr. Perez de Cuellar was briefed on the construction of a railway between Ouagadougou and Tambao, the location of a 20-millio-ton manganese ore deposit in the northeast part of the country close to the borders of Mali and Niger. /He also visited the headquarters of Upper Volta's national grain depot, which regulates the supply and distribution of grain, stabilizes prices and keeps reserve stock for emergency use. At the University of /uagadougou, he opened the new Advanced School for Health Sciences. /Senegal (2-4 February): On 2 February, Mr. Perez de Cuellar met with Abdou Diouf, President of Senegal, in the capital city of Dakar. He also held discussions with a number of ministers, including those of finance, agriculture, planning, environment and hydraulic resources. West Africa's problems were reviewed, as were problems of Senegal's economy and those caused by the drought. /In his 25 January Lagos statement, the Secretary-General also said that what he had seen on his trip had confirmed dramatically "the scale and depth of the crisis which has been inflicted upon an immense portion of the people of this area...afflictions which can no longer be ignored by the world". /The urgent answer to famine had to be food, he said. Creative links had to be established between food aid, food production and rural development. /"Because of their openness and their dependence on primary agricultural and mineral exports, as well as on foreign aid, technology and expertise, African economies have been hit harder by the recent global depression than those of any other region", he said. "The United Nations stands prepared, as a system, to co-ordinate efforts to address the emergency which has stricken this continent." /In the Lagos statement, Mr. Perez de Cuellar said that African nations had to "delve into their own resources, their own means and ingenuity, to meet their fundamental needs and achieve their own goals". They must take the lead in defining what actions were required at the national and international levels. "Africa must interpret Africa and Africa's problems to the world, not the world interpret Africa to itself", he said. /Mr. Perez de Cuellar, citing the "immense economic potential of the continent", said todayhs difficulties were not caused only by the cumulative impact of past domestic policies. Rather they reflected, to an important degree, the impact of natural diasters--combined with unsettling external shocks on a region which was heavily dependent on external markets and which contained the majority of the world's least developed economies. The causes of the severe decline in economic perfomance must be clearly identified so that remedial action would be appropriately addressed to them. /The Secretary-General said the major causes of the crisis were the continuing drought, world recession and deteriorating terms of trade, external destabilization and under-use of human resources. These causes were too complex and deep-seated to disappear in a year or two. Human needs, not only economic viability, had to be taken into account. /He suggested diversification of food production to drought resistant crops, or of export products and markets; import-substitution policies conceived on a bilateral and multilateral basis to reduce the strangulation caused by immense external trade deficits; and resettling residents of desert margins to reduce the risk of desertification. /"African economies have yet to be fully adjusted to the post-colonial environment. They still need to be restructured in order to reduce their vulnerability to international economic fluctuations and setbacks. The development of effective processes of subregional and regional economic co-operation has been painfully slow, although there are outstanding examples of success, especially in recent years", he said /Over-dependence on external advice which had not always been sound had contributed in some respect to present difficulties, he said. How to guard against repeating that error required a great deal of thought. More attention should be paid to the knowledge of African farmers, workers, businessmen, managers and public servants. An extension of usch knowledge from one African country to another would have a very high, rapid payoff. /Similarly, building African potential to negotiate, analyse and develop alternative options could lead to reducing over-dependence on external advice and contribute to the reduction of foreign exchange spending. /Because of the decrease in multilateral aid, an increasing number of African countries, had resorted to borrowing from commercial banks, which had led to alarming levels of indebtedness. /Much needless effort and duplication were spent on planning, and often action was delayed. The Secretary-General understood the situation of national planners faced with the need to set priorities where virtually the entire panoply of problems required priority treatment, where remedies were readily apparent and resources were lacking. "The task before us is indeed huge and the time to act in now", he concluded.