ROME – Diplomats and spooks of key FAO member countries, starved of informal information, have been holding inconclusive meetings on the future of the UN agency prior to formal meetings leading up to the session of the Conference of 2021. That jamboree will be the first plenary Conference of the Director General Qu Dong Yu.

 Western envoys and intelligence service officers operating under diplomatic cover, who cannot even enter the sprawling, heavily-guarded FAO palazzo headquarters in the Aventino, officially because of the Covid pandemic, realize that online workings and procedures give unchecked  and unprecedented power to the Chinese communist head of the poverty-busting organization that is becoming ever more opaque.

 Ambassadors to the FAO can no longer meet with senior FAO officials, in the past always eager and anxious to talk in the corridors and bars and restaurants where they could enjoy lavish alcohol-fuelled lunches of several courses at heavily subsidised prices while discussing how to spend money earmarked for the hungry and starving.

 With the communications division led by UK-Chinese Hak-Fan Lau, official statements on real issues facing the agency are as rare as they were under his unctuous Spanish predecessor.

 The FAO secretariat is “muzzled and leashed,” FAO watchers say, while diplomats of developing countries, often crushed by a debt mountain, dare not object to any initiative by the agency out of fear of being recalled to their countries.

 Many experienced diplomats miss the days when the “tropical” DG, the mercurial José Graziano da Silva, had to engage in constant cut-and-thrust skirmishes with envoys from Western donor countries.

 While Mr Qu has continued his ruthless purge of senior managers appointed by the Brazilian caudillo, former Human Resources Director Fernando Servan, who officially was “summarily dismissed” for charges of sexual harassment, has filed an appeal against his axeing, UN sources say.

 Given that the Peruvian lothario was dubbed a “sex predator” by the NGO Hear their Cries, his chances of being rehabilitated would seem slim, though FAO watchers concede that in the looking-glass world of the UN nothing is impossible.

 jf