ROME – As staff at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) were poised to enjoy a day off work to mark the Chinese New Year this week, observers said Washington's response to the attempt by the UN agency’s Chinese Director General, Qu Dongyu, to obtain a third term of office will be a litmus test of the Trump Administration’s seriousness in curbing Beijing’s growing ambitions at the United Nations and elsewhere.

 The FAO headquarters in Rome was closed Wednesday as the poverty-fighting body put the battle against hunger on hold for celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year. The new holiday caught the eye of a senior executive at the FAO’s sister agency WFP.

 “So FAO now closes for Chinese New Year,” he commented. “The takeover is complete.”

  To mark the festivity Qu posted on the FAO website a video of himself surrounded by dancing Chinese women celebrating the year of the Snake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbo6t_7XgNk 

  In the video a beaming Qu wished everyone “a peaceful and fruitful Year of the Snake full of health, wealth, happiness and prosperity.”

 Even before Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president, Republican congressmen Roger Marshall and Tracy Mann were voicing concern about Qu’s plan to change the FAO constitution so as to allow him to enjoy a third term at the helm of the agency after his current term finishes. They led their Republican colleagues in sending a bicameral letter to then U.S. President Biden, urging him to reject a proposal they said “would alter governance and leadership arrangements at the FAO, strengthen China’s position in the organization, and weaken American agricultural leadership on the world stage.”

 Such concern was shown to be justified at the last Council meeting of the FAO where member state representatives from donor countries first rejected the proposal overwhelmingly but through murky manouvres by the Dutch Chairman of the Council  Chairman, Hans Hoogeveen, the proposal was put back on the agenda for reconsideration at the next Council meeting in April.

 Hoogeven is widely thought to have ambitions to succeed Qu as DG and evidently hopes to be anointed as successor designate as a reward for enabling the scheme for the Chinese communist to enjoy another term.

 The Republican lawmakers while expressing their outrage at the prospect conveniently failed to mention that Qu never would have been elected as DG in the first place in 2019 without the complicity and incompetence of State Department during the first Trump administration.

 A strong French woman candidate, Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle, supported by the European Union was the favourite to be elected to head the FAO but the United States, the largest donor to FAO, decided it didn’t want Paris to get the post and launched the candidature of a little known Georgian agronomist, splitting the Western vote.

 The election of Qu was a setback for the United States and led Washington to undertake a robust policy to prevent China also taking control of WIPO, the UN intellectual property agency in Switzerland.

 Whether this time the Trump administration will move more quickly to prevent Beijing consolidating its hegemony over the FAO remains to be seen.

 The future of the leadership of the World Food Programme also remains uncertain. WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain was returning to Rome via Lebanon recently after undergoing a hip replacement operation in the United States. As a maverick Republican who opposed Trump and helped Biden to be elected Ms McCain could expect to be replaced, possibly by her popular predecessor David Beasley, a former Republican governor of South Carolina, diplomatic sources say.

 The Biden appointed ambassador to the UN food agencies also could be expected to leave Rome soon, only a short time after he arrived to take up the post.

 jf