Timor-Leste Becomes First Asia-Pacific Country to Launch UN’s Zero Hunger Challenge | Division for Inclusive Social Development (DISD)

Timor-Leste, Asia-Pacific’s youngest country, today became the region’s first to launch a national campaign under the United Nations Zero Hunger Challenge, which seeks to ensure universal access to food in the face of looming threats such as climate change.

“Hunger is an unforgivable development failure,” Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), said at the launching ceremony in the National Parliament in Dili, the capital. “It is the single greatest obstacle to creating the inclusive, sustainable, and resilient future we want for all the people of Asia and the Pacific.”

“Working together, hunger can be beaten and the developing countries of Asia and the Pacific, with the support of our development partners, are taking the lead in making hunger history,” said Ms. Heyzer, who is also Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Adviser for Timor-Leste, which the UN shepherded to independence in 2002 after it voted to secede from Indonesia.

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SOURCE: UN News Centre