ROME – FAO DG Jose Graziano da Silva has begun locking staff showers to discourage employees from spending long lunches exercising on the sports track next to the agency, FAO sources say.

 Graziano evidently has become concerned that lunches among the 3000 headquarter staff are too leisurely.  Under the Brazilian agronomist’s predecessor, fun-loving Senegalese Jacques Diouf, a new electronic system was instituted and aside from letting staff members in and out of the building, it also monitors when staff arrive and leave.

  The current DG is concerned that staff members are are extending their hour long lunches.  He chiefly sees staffers who exercise at lunch (using the track next to FAO) as being the biggest time offenders, so he has decided to lock the staff shower rooms in an effort to deter their lunch time physical activity, the sources said.

 “He's not locking all of the showers immediately,” one source said, “just half of them now and then he'll close the other half in the winter.”  As the hygiene-conscious Brazilian sees it, few of the staff are going to want to work covered in perspiration that will pong out their fellow workers.

 Another Stakhanovite effort of the DG to keep FAO staff in the building is to limit their vacation time.

  Staff members in FAO's CIO department have been told that they must limit their vacation time to two weeks only.  Gone are the days of a month's break. 

 Even though the UN awards 6 weeks vacation time a year, there is a use or lose policy in FAO.  By limiting staff from taking their allotted vacation time all at once , staff are apt to be unable to take time during the busier 'school year' months and will thus lose their time.

  "Thus, another cost savings win for the DG."   CIO staffers, having just gone through a massive culling, are too scared to say anything about this new rule, the sources add.