(FAO) is complaining that the upcoming vote is unfairly skewed against him because of his nationality.
“Unfortunately, the election is a political process and this really annoys me because I don’t think that is fair,” Mohammad-Saeid Noori-Naeini, who has played a leading role in major reforms of the FAO, told Agence France Presse (AFP) in an interview.
“We have been reforming the FAO and during the reform we have been saying that the director general should be elected based on his or her merits. But now we see that’s not the case unfortunately,” the economics professor said. “The election is not really a meritocracy-based election,” he charged. He didn’t say how the other candidates lacked merit in his view.
There are six candidates for the post, which will be decided by a majority vote of FAO’s 191 member nations at its annual conference late in June.
The other candidates are from Austria, Brazil, Indonesia, Iraq and Spain.
All of them have impressive credentials. For example, Franz Fischler of Austria was the EU commissioner for agriculture. And Jose Graziano da Silva of Brazil headed that country’s Zero Hunger campaign, which is credited with having raised more than 20 million Brazilians out of poverty.
Noori-Naeini, a university professor, headed up the main FAO committee charged with converting the FAO, a Rome-based organization that has been criticized in the past for its opacity, into a more relevant and effective institution for fighting global hunger.
He formerly served as the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to the FAO for 11 years.
Noori-Naeini said the unrest hitting the Arab world was partly linked to rising food prices, which have hit record highs in recent months. He said FAO could also help bolster the fledgling democracies in North Africa.
“If we really want a more secure world, we have to deal with price fluctuations,” he said, calling for a major international conference involving all food market players that would decide how to limit volatility.