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A welcome sight: it is in dealing with humanitarian issues, both chronic and acute, that the United Nations is perhaps at its best.

Article Excerpt
Humanitarian disasters can occur anywhere, any time. Newspapers around the world continually report on floods, drought, earthquakes, and conflicts that kill and displace people, leaving communities paralyzed.

In the midst of such disasters, UN organizations supply food, shelter, medicines, and other support to the victims--most of them children, women, and the elderly.

Agencies include the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the UN Development Program (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Program (WFP), and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Other UN groups are also represented, as are major non-governmental and intergovernmental humanitarian organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Many such UN agencies do excellent work that often goes completely unnoticed.

The WHO, for example, co-ordinates international efforts to combat infectious diseases such as SARS, malaria, and AIDS. In its work developing and distributing vaccines to combat such diseases, the WHO is close to producing a vaccine against malaria. And, it aims to stamp out polio within the next few years, as it did smallpox in 1979.

As an agency of the United Nations, the World Food Program distributes food to long-term refugees and displaced persons. It also provides emergency food assistance in situations of natural and human-made disasters. In 2000, WFP delivered 3.7 million tonnes of food aid to 83 million people in 83 countries. Based in Rome, the WFP also helps victims of HIV and AIDS: as more and more of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people are struck with the deadly disease they are unable to produce their own food. The WFP's food aid helps keep parents alive loner, and enables orphans and other affected children to stay in school. The program has HIV-related activities in 38 countries worldwide, and is present in 21 of the 25 countries hardest hit by the disease.

In addition,...

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