“The United Nations can provide the platform for making the changes that are needed,” Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo said yesterday, stressing that the world has enough land and ingenuity to feed itself, enough energy to power future prosperity, and sufficient resources for economic growth as well as the knowledge of what needs to be done to avert climate change.

Optimizing the response to these inter-linked challenges is not some abstraction but “an essential, specific call to action that has the potential to be the key global breakthrough of our time,” changing the “global paradigm of development,” he added.

“The food we need, the energy we generate, the minerals and other commodities that catalyze economic growth, and the forests and other land that can be drivers of climate solutions, these are largely in the developing world, and with the right international action, the developing world can lead the world in the creation of the transformational shift we need to see for people across our planet to be truly healthy and secure.”

He called for moving beyond the “global insanity” of the current response to potentially catastrophic climate change, and said the “anaemic delivery” on financial pledges for mitigating climate change “is leading to a disastrous breakdown in trust between the developed and developing world.

On other matters Mr. Jagdeo supported the right of the Palestinians to full statehood, and called for speedy Security Council reform with the expansion of both permanent and non-permanent membership and enhanced representation for developing countries, noting that neither Africa with 54 Member States, nor Latin America and the Caribbean region with 33, currently have a permanent seat.