Statement by Md Faruk Hossain, Minister, Bangladesh to the UN in New York at the handover ceremony of the chairmanship of the LDC Group, CR11, UNHQ, 05 April 2023
Mr. Chair, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates.
Let me join others in warmly congratulating Nepal for taking up the chairmanship of the LDC Group. Your remarks today, Mr. Chair, as the Permanent Representative of Nepal, assures us of Nepal’s deep commitment to the Group and gives us the confidence that the Group would be ably led in the days ahead.
- I also take this opportunity to extend my delegation’s sincere appreciation for Malawi for successfully guiding the Group for more than 4 years, particularly through the challenging times of the pandemic and the conflicts, among other adversities.
- Allow me also to thank OHRLSS, and in particular, the Under-Secretary General and high representative Madam Rabab Fatima, for extending valuable and timely support to the Group enabling us to navigate through difficult times. The scale of future support to the group that madam Rabab Fatima outlined today is very reassuring.
Mr. Chair,
- I reaffirm Bangladesh’s continued commitment to the Group. Under the leadership of Nepal, we expect that the LDC Group would be more visible and maintain its strongest voice in protecting the interests of the LDCs.
Mr. Chair,
- The year 2023 presents both opportunities and challenges. Challenges because the group’s membership, which represents some of the most vulnerable countries on the planet, are faced with the repercussions of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the existential climate crisis, among manyother barriers to development. These challenges have aggravated our structural vulnerabilities, tested our resilience, and weakened our prospects of recovery, and achieving the SDGs.
To be frank, our path to recovery remains daunting. That is because our economies have been hit hard, our debt burden ballooned. our food and energy securities compromised, climatic shocks have amplified, and international cooperation diminished.
Mr. Chair,
There are of course opportunities before us. We have the transformative Doha Programme of Action whose implementation is crucial for the sustainable development of the LDCs.
We are also going to have a series of high-level meetings in 2023 and beyond, around many issue areas, critical for the LDCs. The LDC5 and the UN-Water Conferences have just concluded, while negotiations for the outcome documents of the SDG Summit and the Summit of the Future, and other processes such as the Ffd, Global Digital Compact and the HLPF are currently ongoing.
We must raise our voices and bring our collective negotiating capacity to bear to protect the interests of the LDCs in these negotiations.
Since these negotiations are taking place in the format of G77 versus the partners, LDC countries should be more vocal and active within the G77, since there are not many opportunities to directly negotiate with the partners on the LDC issues per se.
If LDCs do not stand up and speak for themselves- be it to seek support for DPOA implementation or graduation or demand solutions to problems we have hardly caused, remember, no one else will speak for us. Perhaps we need to realize that groups at the UN are mostly self-centered and in times of urgency, we need to be steadfast if not selfish in protecting our interests.
Mr. Chair,
We strongly believe that the LDC group needs, as have been mentioned by others, renewed impetus, dynamism, and solidarity to overcome the challenges that we face and also to take advantage of the opportunities that are before us.
We are confident that Nepal’s chairmanship would infuse these collaborative spirits among the group’s members and lead us in the direction necessary to achieve our shared development aspirations.
I wish to conclude by reassuring the Nepalese delegation of Bangladesh’s fullest cooperation for their LDC Chairmanship for the critical time ahead.
I thank you, Mr. Chair.
