ROME – The Food and Agriculture Organization Ombudsman who has championed the rights of consultants and “ghost workers” at the UN agency who she said are “vulnerable to exploitation,” is expected to move to the sister agency World Food Programme to carry out the same job taking up the cudgels for employees, diplomatic sources say.

 Chinese FAO Director General Qu Dongyu would have to sign off on the transfer under which as the WFP Ombudsman or Ombuds Katya Melluish would be a D2 post, a step up the UN rung on a higher salary compared to being a mere D1 at FAO, the sources added. A number of senior FAO staff have been mulling their options following Qu’s insistence that even director level executives, except for himself, should have only renewable 12 month employable contracts on the ground that it makes them work harder, possibly as hard as the DG who claims he puts in a stakhanovite 16 hour day worthy of the Soviet Union’s heroes of Communist labour.

 In a hard-hitting report issued last September Ms Delluish said that consultants at the Food and Agriculture Organization and people employed on local and short term contracts as “ghost staff” are “vulnerable to exploitation” by the poverty-busting agency including abuse by managers, sexual harassment, overburden of work and firing without due process.

 The Ombudsperson also lambasted the cover up culture at FAO abused by frequently "disrespectful managers" and recommended wide ranging changes to restore flagging staff morale, including measures to help employees working for long periods without rotation on the front line in far-flung countries remote from headquarters.

 “Visitors and other interlocutors of the Ombudsperson continue to raise the issue of the long-term, repeated employment of individuals via the mechanisms of consultancy, personal service agreement (PSA) contracts and national project personnel (NPP) contracts,” said the report for 2022.

 “The majority of these do not fall under the Staff Regulations of FAO, meaning that these personnel do not have recourse to the existing internal justice mechanisms, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Visitors continue to describe circumstances of abuse by managers, including harassment, sexual harassment, overburden of work, and threats of (or actual) termination without due process. Given the relative insecurity of their contracts, these affiliate personnel are often afraid to speak out let alone to lodge formal complaints, which they feel might jeopardise their chances of future employment at FAO.”

 Ms Melluish, an Oxford history graduate with extensive experience as a UN lawyer, was appointed to the post at the Rome-based agency in August 2020.She is expected to be welcomed by staff and consultants at WFP, demoralised under the lacklustre leadership of Executive Director Cindy McCain.

 jf