By Michel Rose
PARIS, April 29 (Reuters) – The United Nations is facing a critical moment with its financial sustainability under threat and it should do “less with less”, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan said on Wednesday, as she campaigns to become the next U.N. secretary‑general.
The U.N. has warned it was nearing effective bankruptcy, driven largely by delayed or withheld contributions from major donors, with the United States — its largest funder — frequently in arrears.
“I think that we are in a very difficult moment,” Grynspan, a former Costa Rican Vice President, told Reuters and Bloomberg in an interview in Paris, as she campaigns in countries sitting on the U.N. Security Council.
She warned that uncertainty over member state payments was crippling the organisation’s ability to plan: “I think that the financial sustainability of the budget of the U.N. is at stake.”
“I don’t think we should do more with less. I think that we have to do less with less – and focus more,” she said.
Four candidates are vying to succeed Secretary‑General Antonio Guterres from the start of next year, with the winner inheriting an organisation whose stature has diminished amid great‑power rivalry and U.S. criticism of multilateralism.
An economist born to parents who fled Europe after World War Two and the current head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Grynspan, 70, said the U.N. had been absent from too many conflicts and should be willing to take more risks by proposing mediation more often, even if it is initially rejected.
She also said the organisation should partner more with non‑governmental groups and the private sector and act more as an “enabler.”
“Not everything has to happen within the U.N.,” she said.
Asked about U.S. President Donald Trump, a fierce critic of the U.N., she said the organisation should be “less defensive” in the face of criticism.
“I will take from what Donald Trump said in the General Assembly the phrase that he said: The U.N. has potential, but it’s not living up to the potential,” she said.
On whether the organisation faces an existential crisis, Grynspan struck a note of guarded optimism.
“If it’s a life or death moment for the U.N., I have my doubts,” she said. “Most of it comes from the conviction that the world is better with the U.N. than without it. I am running because I believe in the charter, I believe in the principles of the U.N.”
(Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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