XUNICEF News and Views

By Peter Greaves From the editors: Peter Greaves passed away on 16th December 2021. Peter had shared the following article for inclusion in our December Quarterly, 2021. To reach a larger audience, we are currently reprinting all articles of the December Quarterly. Children born today will be fighting each other for food and water in 2050 if the COP26 climate summit fails, exhausted delegates in Glasgow were told as the deadline for a deal passed without agreement. But further negotiations finally led to agreement being reached, on a text that, at the insistence of India and China, stated that the use of coal should be phased down, instead of phased out, as the president of the conference had wanted. The Glasgow climate pact retained the strengthened goal of limiting global heating to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, but was decidedly weak on actions to achieve it. There is only one way: the use of fossil fuels must be stopped altogether. The pact does not name oil and gas specifical...

Life begins at 40, it is said, and that was the age when I, with my family, arrived in New Delhi shortly before Christmas in 1972. An FAO nutritionist, I had been assigned to the South Central Asia Regional Office. The Regional Director, Gordon Carter, an Englishman who after World War II sought out the French woman who helped him escape when he was shot down over France and married her, was a disciplinarian who signed his memoranda etc with his first initial only, G. Those in the second rank used 2 initials, while all the rest of us had to use 3. One of his deputies, John Grun, a Dutchman (married to an English woman), spent several years of the war in solitary confinement, where he memorised chunks of Shakespeare and the Bible. He had characteristics of a Bishop, a Head Teacher, and an Actor. I found the office was much preoccupied with developing the Framework and 8 Components of what became the Master Plan of Operations for a Programme of Services for Children in India, 1974-...