ROME – China’s victory in the Food and Agriculture Organization election due to bungled U.S. diplomacy and ruthless Oriental tactics paves the way for Beijing to try and take control also of FAO's sister UN agency, the World Food Programme, a traditional American fiefdom and the world's largest humanitarian agency, diplomatic sources say.

  The prospect of Qu Dongyu, the apparently amiable Chinese director general of the FAO, using his position as a Trojan horse for China to increase influence at the WFP is hinted at in a long self-flagelating post-mortem on American mishandling of the FAO election and alleged Chinese skullduggery (such as the bribery by Beijing of Cameroon to drop its candidature) in an important new article in Foreign Policy magazine   https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/23/china-united-states-fao-kevin-moley/ 

 But the FP analysis stops short of spelling out that the WFP Executive Director is appointed directly by the FAO director general together with the UN Secretary general, who currently is widely considered a friend of China. The current respected WFP Executive Director, former South Carolina governor David Beasley, might well run for a second term at WFP after beefing up the agency’s budget to as much as some dlrs 7 billion in just two years from its previous level of dlrs 5 billion.

 But in other areas Beasley has been frustrated by an entrenched old guard of career hungercrats disgruntled by his efforts to root out sexual harassment and other abuses of power in the sun-drenched headquarters building of the Eternal City, WFP insiders say.

 Former FAO director general José Graziano da Silva disregarded completely the opinions of major donors to WFP such as Germany, which had two candidates for ED, when he imposed the appointment of Mr Beasley, widely seen as a quid pro quo for Washington in return for the Trump administration not opposing Graziano’s second term as DG at the FAO despite his having sidelined and fired numerous Americans in his first term at FAO. Germany was outraged at Graziano's high-handed approach but stopped short of pulling its funding.

 It is doubtful that the sleepy Executive Board of WFP would mount a more spirited defence if Dongyu backed by Gutteres seeks to impose a Chinese candidate, or a candidate from a country friendly to China, to take over leadership of WFP. American Ambassador to the FAO Kip Tom was slow to take up his post in Rome and is described by colleagues as 'rarely in the office,' partly because he often accompanies UN agency heads on their travels. A successful farmer and agriculture businessman, he shows scant interest in the nitty gritty of UN politics.

 The Foreign Policy article shows how the State Department and the US Embassy in Rome were fatally divided over whether to support the Georgian candidate to be FAO chief or the French candidate backed by the EU.

 Kevin Moley, the official in charge of the pisspoor State Department campaign for the FAO election, has since retired, but it is unclear whether State will devise a new strategy to protect American interests at WFP or whether it will be ‘outfoxed and outgunned’ again by wily Chinese strategists.

 Whatever the case, the election of Qu Dongyu was a major humiliation for the Trump administration and Beijing must now surely be tempted to inflict another stinging defeat on the State Department by ousting the United States from WFP, observers say.

 jp