Saeid Noori-Naeini had predicted a few weeks before the balloting that he would get few votes, saying his nationality was working against him.
In the balloting June 26, each of the FAO’s 191 member states had one vote. That is different from most UN specialized organizations where votes are generally based on the scale of a country’s financial contributions and the United States usually has a quarter of all the votes.
In the balloting, Brazil’s Jose Graziano da Silva was elected director general for a 3 1/2-year term with 92 votes. Spain’s Miquel Angel Moratinos Cuyaube came in second with 88 votes. Noori-Naeini and three others from Iraq, Indonesia and Austria all dropped out when they only got a handful of votes in preliminary balloting.
The Rome-based FAO is charged with defeating hunger around the world by improving farming methods, irrigation and nutrition.
Noori-Naeini was for a long time Iran’s envoy to the FAO and has worked on many of the organization’s projects over the years, giving him more FAO experience than the others.
“Unfortunately,” he told Agence France Presse in an interview, “the election is a political process and this really annoys me because I don’t think that is fair. The election is not really a meritocracy-based election.”
The FAO has been led for 18 years by Senegal’s Jacques Diouf. It has come under considerable criticism as a slow-moving and unimaginative bureaucracy.
The new director general started Brazil’s very successful “Zero Hunger” plan in 2003 that saw hunger in the country halved and those living in extreme poverty fall from 12 percent in 2003 to 4.8 percent in 2009. He has pledged to prune the FAO’s bureaucracy.