Monday, June 7, 2010

UN Vienna Visit


Today our group visited the United Nations Headquaters in Vienna, Austria which is the third largest of the four UN headquaters after New York City and Geneva, Switzerland respectively and just ahead of Nairobi, Kenya. The UNOV is the location for several important UN organizations most notably the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) established in 1957 in part due to a speech "Atoms for peace"given by US President Eisenhower in 1953.


Another important organization located at UNOV is the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) established in 1997. The mandate of the UNODC is to assist member states in their struggle against illicit drugs, crime, and terrorism. UNODC persues real initiatives to fulfill its UN mandate. For example, UNODC launced a program known as "Alternative Development"
in six countries (Afganistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Lao, Myanmar, and Peru) to provide rural farmers with legal alternatives to such crops as marijuana, cocoa, popy, etc. The programs goal is to provide impoverished areas of the world with real economically sustainable crops.

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