F. DEVELOPING WORK OF The Secretariat, as one of the six principal organs of the United Nations, has the task of servicing meetings of the other principal organs and their subsidiary bodies, preparing studies and background materials for such meetings, serving as the executive agent of these organs, and supplying information on the purposes and daily activities of the United Nations. During the year under review the Secretariat staff decreased slightly from 4,166 to 4,117. Of this latter total, 3,228 serve in New York. The 889 who serve in offices elsewhere are widely distributed: 630 are in the European office at Geneva, 66 in the information centers, 141 are staff members of the economic commissions for Latin America and for Asia and the Far East, and 52 serve with the special committees and commissions established by the General Assembly and the Security Council. The fifth anniversary of the United Nations saw a relatively stable and well-tested administrative machinery which is capable of discharging the increasing demands placed upon it by the various U.N. organs. The conference machinery, for example, is capable of handling a work load the magnitude of which is indicated by the fact that, during the 12-month period from July 1, 1949, to June 30, 1950, more than 1,800 meetings were serviced, 180,000 pages of translation completed, and 260,000,000 impressions produced by internal printing facilities. While many phases of the organization's work have necessitated experimentation with new and previously untried techniques, the most challenging problems of an administrative character have arisen out of the necessity to service U.N. undertakings in far-flung areas of actual or threatened conflict-Korea, Kashmir, Indonesia, the Balkans, and Palestine, and in areas preparing for self-government— Libya, Eritrea, and Somaliland. Many political, administrative, and technical staff members have had to be detached from established Headquarters duties; corps of military observers hastily organized for frontier and armistice supervision; guards, communications, and other ancillary personnel recruited and trained; transportation and communications equipment mobilized; equitable standards determined for salaries, allowances, and other conditions of employment on mission service; and adequate financial and administrative procedures and controls instituted. Attention has also been focused this year on the administrative as well as the substantive aspects of technical assistance. The Secretariat has worked closely with representatives of the specialized agencies on the Technical Assistance Board in the formulation of policies for the financial and personnel administration of the expanded program of technical assistance. Agreement has been reached on the general arrangements under which the Secretary-General will carry out his responsibilities in connection with the collection, allocation, and disbursement of the funds of the Special Account as well as for their accounting. Special arrangements have also been worked out with a view to the adoption by participating agencies of common standards and conditions of employment of personnel for technical assistance missions. During the year 1950 the General Assembly made some fundamental changes in the system of classifying and grading staff and a number of significant changes in the policy and procedures governing allowances. These changes are designed to create a simpler and more flexible and rational salary and allowance system for international employees. G. ORGANIZATIONAL INTER RELATIONSHIPS The Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly continued in 1950 to give special attention to matters concerning the proper coordination of the activities of the United Nations and the specialized agencies. The responsibilities of the Economic and Social Council and the Assembly in regard to the specialized agencies are defined in the Charter and in the agreements which have been drawn up between the United Nations and each of the agencies. To a greater extent than is commonly recognized, coordination within the U.N. system is achieved in the normal course of consultation and collaboration among the specialized agencies and the United Nations on matters of mutual concern in their efforts to employ relatively limited resources to the greatest effect. This process is the foundation for the more formal coordination of the system as a whole provided by the United Nations itself through the actions of its own bodies. These are the Economic and Social Council, the interagency Administrative Committee on Coordination established by the Secretary-General at the request of the Council, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, and the Secretariat. The prominence given to matters of U.N. and specialized-agency coordination in the deliberations of the Economic and Social Council, together with the resolutions adopted by successive sessions of the General Assembly, clearly demonstrates the extent to which member states look upon the United Nations as a central instrumentality for focusing attention on issues of program correlation and administrative policy which are of concern to them as members both of the United Nations and of the specialized agencies. The specialized agencies are, for the most part, organized on the basis of broad fields of interest. The subject of agriculture is the province of the Food and Agriculture Organization; civil aviation is peculiarly the responsibility of the International Civil Aviation Organization; health is the direct concern of the World Health Organization, etc. This basis of organization greatly facilitates the maintenance of effective working relationships with member states, inasmuch as the administrative organization of most member states provides for an action agency having national responsibility in the same field. Today there is within each specialized agency a substantial core of specialized, and frequently highly technical, activity which presents no critical problems of specialized-agency coordination. For example, the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization in carrying out the highly important World Agricultural Census of 1950 bears no particular relationship to the work of the World Health Organization in establishing international standards for biological products. Surrounding these cores of intensely specialized activity, however, are areas of work in which the specializations of two or more organizations do converge and in which there must be an accommodation of interests. The extent of accommodation which has been achieved within these areas of mutual interest is sufficient so that, today, the evils of duplication in activity, and of programs that work at cross purposes, have been largely avoided or eliminated. Not all problems have been solved, for organizations possessed of vitality and a sense of purpose will always encounter questions of jurisdiction. But great progress has been made, and the member states and the organizations themselves are becoming better trained in the development and use of the machinery of coordination. The Economic and Social Council, in its review of specialized agency activities and of the program of the United Nations itself in the economic and social field, is increasingly effective. This can be said also of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, which reviews the budgets of specialized agencies and reports thereon to the General Assembly. In 1950 the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly reached beyond the existing confines of the United Nations system in a move toward further consolidation of international organization activity generally. This took the form of General Assembly approval of a plan to terminate the International Penal and Penitentiary Commission and transfer its functions to the United Nations. The termination of this organization and the assimilation of its functions into the U.N. program in the social field is one element in a larger design for more effective international cooperation through a reduction in the number of separate organizations which member states are asked to support. The agreement provides an example for further efforts by the United Nations and the specialized agencies in relation to other small autonomous technical bodies. The work of the United Nations and the specialized agencies which requires the highest degree of coordination lies in the technicalassistance field. The special machinery for coordination provided here consists of a Technical Assistance Committee, representative of governments, and a Technical Assistance Board on which the secretariats of all agencies are represented. During the year the Technical Assistance Board concentrated its attention on the development of common practices with respect to matters such as program presentation, cost determination, accounting and auditing for the expanded program of technical assistance. The Administrative Committee on Coordination, composed of the Secretary-General and the chief executive officers of the specialized agencies, which is the regular channel of administrative coordination at the Secretariat level, continued its efforts toward the improvement and rationalization of administration within the agencies. During the year the Committee completed the drafting of a set of uniform financial regulations. These have been accepted by the General Assembly for the United Nations and are now under consideration by the specialized agencies. As the processes of coordination between the United Nations and the specialized agencies have been strengthened, the United Nations has increasingly turned its attention to questions of the essentiality and priority of activities within the individual programs of the specialized agencies. During 1950 the Economic and Social Council, acting at the request of the fourth General Assembly, considered methods of promoting the concentration of each agency's efforts and resources on tasks of primary importance and recommended criteria for determining project priorities. The fifth General Assembly requested each specialized agency to review its program in the coming year along the lines recommended by the Economic and Social Council and requested the Council and the specialized agencies to indicate, when new projects were adopted, what current projects might be deferred, modified, or eliminated to insure the maximum effectiveness of the activities of the U.N. system as a whole in the economic and social fields. In making its review of the program of the United Nations and the specialized agencies in the coming year, the Economic and Social Council will have the assistance of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions. |