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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has put in place an exceptional economy plan to compensate for the late payments of several countries, including the United States. Restrictive measures must enable the international organization to control its costs. The budget has been in the red since the end of September and $ 950 million is needed to cover the next three months.
With our correspondent in New York, Carrie Nooten
Some official documents are no longer translated, meetings are canceled, diplomats travel to a minimum and hiring is frozen. The UN administration has sought to reduce all possible cost items, excluding salaries, in order to keep up.
The seat of New York is not the only one concerned. Geneva, Vienna, Nairobi and the four regional commissions are urged to tighten their belts. Antonio Guterres warned that the UN accused " its most serious deficit of the decade, " and even if partial payments in recent days have been paid and ensure the settlement of wages in November, the situation remains tense.
Trump's Dedain
Of its $ 3 billion budget, the United Nations is still expected to receive $ 1.3 billion for fiscal 2019. A group of seven countries " bad payers " account for 97% of the missing money, namely the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Iran, Israel and Venezuela.
The UN is used to receiving the share of its largest contributor, the United States, relatively late in the year, but Donald Trump's disdain for it adds to the nervousness. Above all, the organization is worried about a general trend towards late payments, which is causing an earlier and longer budget deficit, which lasts longer and gets heavier.
The issue of liquidity, recurrent at the UN, has become so worrying that without cost reductions put in place by January 2019, the organization could not have financially organized the General Assembly last September , which is attended by heads of state from around the world.
► See also: Should the UN Security Council be reformed?