UN wasting money

Normally, about once a week I find on my desk a package enclosed in a rubber band, a pile of printed letters, circulars, heart-rending pictures of poor children and starving children, a raft of appeals for funds to fight arthritis, multiple sclerosis, urgent warnings that without an immediate contribution this private university will have to close down, or that historic building will be bulldozed by developers.

I've only touched the outer layers of such literature. Bulging in the centre, like the fat heart of the artichoke, is denser stuff, beautifully printed prospectuses of some coming series of volumes on cookery, or history, or the habits of the Trobriand islanders. This is the stuff that you can throw in the wastebasket at once. Not because I'm not interested in cookery or history or even the sexual customs of remote Pacific tribes, but because the literature promoting these works looks and feels almost as expensive as the books themselves and I resent doubling the price of the books I'm urged to purchase by the sheer opulence of the thing advertised. 

This luxury, by way of expensive paper, beautiful printing, three-colour illustrations, extends, strangely enough, to some charities that you'd think would be busy saving every penny for the actual treatment of the arthritics, the doomed historic building or whatever. 

I don't suppose there's a country anywhere which is as lavishly wasteful as the United States in promoting good causes which, themselves, ought to absorb all the money that's being solicited. Some years ago, there was an evening newspaper in New York – like all the other evening newspapers except one, it foundered – that ran a regular feature every year for several weeks. It was an example of muck-raking or investigative reporting, at its best, as distinct from some recent keyhole discoveries which constitute investigative reporting at its worst, which we'll come to later. 

This newspaper, then, did an annual job of digging into several hundred charities and listing the percentage of their budgets that was spent on staff's salaries and advertising, along with the amount of money spent on relieving or curing the sick or the stated aim of the charity. The revelations of this checking amounted to a scandal. One year, I seem to recall, only about a third of the charities that were checked spent more on the good cause than on the advertising of it and the maintenance of offices and a permanent staff. 

Well, the other day, a shocker came out of Lima, Peru and it would have come out of Rome if the spokesman had been speaking from his home. It came from the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the so-called FAO, of the United Nations. Now whatever you may think of the UN as an effective political outfit, I don't think any knowledgeable person is going to knock the work of some of its agencies, like the FAO or the World Health Organisation. We all take much too much for granted, for instance, the really splendid work that radiates out of the World Health Organisation's headquarters in Geneva. In the age of air travel, when a man with cholera can be in Malaya one day and in Edinburgh the next, the World Health Organisation does a job – and it does it 24 hours a day – a job of reporting and prevention which, if it wasn't done by the United Nations, would have to be done by some other world organisation. 

Well, back to the shocker out of Lima, Peru. There, last Saturday, the director– not an underling, but the director – of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said that its work was quite ineffectual and you know why? His figures make the FAO sound like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan and would be very funny if they weren't very tragic. 

'The FAO is totally ineffectual', he said, 'because 80 per cent of its budget, which is contributed by the member nations (25 per cent naturally by the United States of America), 80 per cent pays for the offices and staff of what he called the "gigantic centralised bureaucracy in Rome", 11 per cent goes to put out publications' – and I'm still quoting him – 'that nobody reads and the remaining nine per cent to holding meetings and for travel expenses that are largely unnecessary.' The great work of the FAO which is to survey and supply the needs, by way of food and crops and such, of impoverished nations is hampered, to put it mildly, by the fact that four-fifths of its funds are gobbled up maintaining over 4,000 employees in seven impressive buildings in Rome. 

The director of the FAO is a Mr Saouma, a Lebanese and since he was speaking in South America, he had to say that the money required to staff the FAO and publicise its theoretical great work does not leave one dollar over to spend on the agricultural problems of Latin America, which is one of the three continents, Africa and Asia being the others, that cry for help in farming, the production of foodstuffs, the relief of starvation and the prospect of famine. 

Parkinson's Law that a bureaucracy increases in size in inverse proportion to the work it's doing seems to have achieved its finest demonstration in the work, or non-work, of the FAO. 

And this invites a comment, which I will accept, on what you might call the 'fringe' uses of money for essential purposes. There's been, as we all know, a tremendous to-do about the bribing of foreigners by companies involved in overseas business. Those of us who don't work for overseas corporations are properly shocked. Some of the airplane company executives, who testified before a Senate committee looking into such dreadful goings-on, they seemed in a way shocked themselves, but not so much shocked by the fact of the monies they pay out to secure foreign contracts, but shocked that these monies, even when they are balanced in the ledgers, should be interpreted as bribes. We, who don't take part in such shady negotiations, don't understand the executives. 

Yet we all understand, and the tax people of all countries allow, business entertainment. Let's say a broadcasting executive wants me to do a television series on, I don't know, the threat to the existence of the California condor or the history of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes – I've had weirder offers – and he takes me out to lunch. He can deduct this from his gross income as a legitimate business expense. And the aim is plainly to persuade me to say yes. He doesn't feed me a regular, plain meal prescribed by the Internal Revenue service, he asks me what I want and he makes an effort to please me in this and other ways. Now, is the half-bottle of wine and the poached salmon or the steak and kidney pudding a bribe? I suppose if I said, which is true mostly, that I don't eat lunch but I'd take the cost of the meal, that would be criminal, would it not? Would that be bribery or extortion on my part or his? And way up the scale to the stratosphere of international contracts, imagine a nation whose energy, labour, productivity, the existence of a going economy (as distinct from bankruptcy) depend on getting oil from abroad – a definition which covers a lot of countries. And suppose the agent for the supplying nation says, 'Yes, the contract's yours, but only if you give me a bigger bonus than I've been offered by another nation that wants this oil too.' 

What are you to do? I'm not of course condoning bribery, extortion or corruption. I can be as readily and righteously shocked as anybody. I'm just saying that in the public discussion of the oil and airplane scandals, there's a great deal of 'foggy' righteous indignation from comfortable people, whose comfort depends on oil in their furnaces and work at the airplane factory. And that we might begin to dispel this fog with a little more careful analysis of the words 'bribery, corruption and business entertainment'. 

I dropped a dark hint earlier that there are good and bad forms of investigative reporting and I implied the hint also that I, for one, have been shocked. It's not difficult to guess by what. The excellent reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, of the Washington Post performed a public service when they dug, night and day, through many months, to reveal the devious involvement of the White House in the Watergate scandal and laundered dollars and dirty tricks, and all the rest of it. They provided the raw, the very raw, material on which the house judiciary committee held its hearings and voted to impeach President Nixon. Anyone who believes, at this late date, that Mr Nixon was innocent of steady and calculated lying to the press and the people will believe anything. But, once the house acted and Mr Nixon's right-wing associates went to the White House, told him the Senate could not raise more than four or five voices to declare him innocent and then told him he must go, I suggest that that should have been the end. 

Woodward and Bernstein have now put out a book, 'The Final Days' which wallows in the private turmoil and indignity of the Nixon family in its wretched twilight in the White House. The authors say that they have put in nothing that wasn't told them by at least two people. Which two? How many people knew how often the president slept with his wife? How many counted the drinks he took in the loneliness of his study? 

The book is riddled with pseudo-fictional asides, telling us exactly whose brow furrowed when the president rapped his ring on the desk. I think the only answer to this sort of stuff is the question, put by an old American immigrant comedian who used to listen wearily to Charlie, the neighbourhood gossip and say, 'Was you der Charlie?' If any of this private gossip is correct, it's surely cruel to print it. If it's incorrect, it's scandalous. 

Mind you much of it is fascinating, but I suggest it would have been worth foregoing the fascination for the sake of the compassion.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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