Strait of Hormuz de-escalation is urgent, says UN chief

“My strong appeal is for the negotiations to go on until that diplomatic solution is found, the ceasefire to be maintained, and in between, the Strait of Hormuz to be completely open…Any restart of the fighting would have terrible consequences,” António Guterres said.

Speaking in Nairobi ahead of the Africa Forward Summit, the UN chief insisted that the Middle East emergency was no “distant crisis”, as roughly 13 per cent of Africa’s imports of largely oil and fertilizers move through the key waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the wider world.

“It is absolutely essential and we have appealed to the two parties to open the Strait of Hormuz completely, without restrictions… [it] is a must from the point of view of the interests of the international community as a whole,” he told journalists in the Kenyan capital.

“That is the only way to bring energy prices and fertiliser prices back to the levels that we had before the war.”

Planting pressure

Kenya is in a less vulnerable position because most of its planting season is over, but many other African nations are still waiting to receive fertilizers and other agricultural inputs produced in the Gulf, Mr. Guterres cautioned.

Today, the price of urea – which contains concentrated nitrogen and is one of the world’s most widely used fertilizers – has risen by more than 35 per cent in a month, at the height of the planting season.

“Without fertilizers, you can imagine that we risk to have a serious food security problem next year,” he explained.

The Secretary-General’s comments came as he unveiled new UN offices and attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new conference facility at the UN Office at Nairobi.

Security Council reform

He underscored Africa’s vast potential and noted that it continues to be held back by an international system set up by and skewed in favour of the victors of the Second World War.

This has left the continent’s nations crippled by high borrowing costs, insufficient climate financing and underrepresentation in global decision-making bodies. 

“It is not acceptable that African countries pay more than three times more than developed countries in order to obtain the loans they need for the development, Mr. Guterres insisted, in a call for reforms of the international financial architecture, greater investment opportunities for African countries and permanent African representation on the Security Council. 

On this last point, the Secretary-General noted that France and the UK were “preparing legislation” to limit the use of the veto by the five permanent members of the Security Council in cases involving genocide or other egregrious crimes.

“These questions are on the table or will be soon on the table,” he said. “We need to have all countries recognising that…a Security Council in which there are three European members, one Asian member and one North American member and no Latin America or African members [and] just one Asian doesn’t correspond at all to the world of today. And this creates a problem of legitimacy. And with legitimacy comes its effectiveness in guaranteeing peace and security in the world.”

The UN chief also addressed conflicts across the continent, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Sudan, renewed dialogue in South Sudan, progress towards peace in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and political solutions to insecurity and terrorism in the Sahel.

Peace in these conflicts requires that countries “many times from outside Africa, stop being the spoilers of these conflicts, providing weapons to the parties to the conflict, and making it more difficult to find peaceful solutions”, Mr. Guterres insisted.