Speaking in Nairobi ahead of the Africa Forward Summit, the UN chief insisted the Middle East emergency was not a “distant crisis” as about 13 percent of African imports, mainly oil and fertilizers, pass through the key waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world.
“It is absolutely essential and we have called on the two sides to fully open the Strait of Hormuz, without restrictions… (it is) a necessity from the point of view of the interests of the international community as a whole,” he told reporters in the Kenyan capital.
“That is the only way to get energy and fertilizer prices back to the levels we had before the war.”
Seeding pressure
Kenya is in a less vulnerable position because most of its planting season has ended, but many other African nations are still waiting to receive fertilizers and other agricultural inputs produced in the Gulf, Guterres warned.
Today, the price of urea – which contains concentrated nitrogen and is one of the most widely used fertilizers in the world – has risen more than 35 percent in one month, at the height of the planting season.
“Without fertilizers, you can imagine we run the risk of having a serious food security problem next year,” he explained.
The Secretary-General’s comments came as he inaugurated new UN offices and attended an opening ceremony for a new conference facility at the UN Office in Nairobi.
Africa held back
He underlined Africa’s enormous potential and noted that it remains stagnant by an international system created and biased in favor of the victors of World War II.
This has left the continent’s nations crippled by high borrowing costs, insufficient climate financing and underrepresentation in global decision-making bodies.
“It is not acceptable that African countries pay more than three times as much as developed countries to obtain the loans they need for development,” Guterres insisted, calling for reforms of the international financial architecture, greater investment opportunities for African countries and permanent African representation on the Security Council.
On this last point, the Secretary-General noted that France and the United Kingdom were “preparing legislation” to limit the use of the veto by the five permanent members of the Security Council in cases of genocide or other atrocity crimes.
“These issues are on the table or will be soon,” he said. “We need all countries to recognize that… a Security Council in which there are three European members, one Asian member and one North American member and no Latin American or African member (and) only one Asian does not correspond at all to the world today. And this creates a problem of legitimacy. And with legitimacy comes its effectiveness in guaranteeing peace and security in the world.”
The UN chief also addressed conflicts across the continent, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan, renewed dialogue in South Sudan, progress towards peace in eastern DRC and political solutions to insecurity and terrorism in the Sahel.
Peace in these conflicts requires that countries “often outside Africa, stop being the saboteurs of these conflicts, providing weapons to the parties in conflict and making it difficult to find peaceful solutions,” Guterres insisted.