BAGHDAD, July 6: Iraq is set to raise more than the ceiling of 5.2 billion dollars fixed for its oil exports during the current six-month phase of a humanitarian programme, a senior UN envoy said here yesterday, reports AFP.
But Benon Sevan, the New York-based director of the UN humanitarian programme for Iraq, warned against "complacency" and said the country's lifeline oil industry was still in dire need of spare parts.
"The current rise in production and exports is being achieved at a very high price, high price in terms of damaging wells, some of them irreparably. and also with serious consequences to the environment." he told reporters.
"We should not be complacent. irrespective of the increase.” Seven said at the end of a mission of more than two weeks during which he met Iraqi officials and visited the Kurdish-held north.
The envoy called for the UN sanctions committee, to which
Iraq's contracts are submitted, "to proceed expeditiously in ap- ' proving the spare parts as well as equipment for the oil industry.”
A major need is communications equipment for the battered oil industry, he said. 'You just cannot go on loading ships without a rudimentary communication system. God help anybody against a major accident." said Sevan.
He also warned it took up to 18 months to customise equipment for oil installations and added that contracts for spare parts needed to be approved as a package to be effective.
On the positive side, "based on what the oil price was on Friday last, we will achieve higher revenues than the 5.2 billion dollars" under the oil-for-food programme, Sevan said, referring to the recovery in .world prices.
He pointed out that the UN Security Council had left the door open to raising the ceiling for the programme, which allows sanctions-hit Iraq to ex^ .
port crude in return for food, medicine and other humanitarian imports.
The latest phase of the programme was launched on May
Oil Minister Amer Rashid has since announced that Baghdad aims to increase its production capacity to three million barrels per day (bpd) by the end of this year.
Iraq now produces about 2.65 million bpd of which nearly two million barrels are exported.
On the medical situation in Iraq. Sevan said he agreed with Iraqi officials to draw up an inventory of supplies which have arrived in the country but not
report that 70 million dollars worth of imported equipment has been kept in storage, despite Iraqi protests that Washington and London were using the sanctions committee to hold up medical contracts.
Sevan said the Iraqis had explained, for instance, that
300 dental chairs worth 24 million dollars were "useless" because they arrived without the necessary compressors.
On the effectiveness of the oil-for-food programme, he warned it was "never meant to meet all the humanitarian needs" of Iraq’s 22 million population.
"Irrespective of the funding level, irrespective whether supplies arrive on time or not ... there is no way we can meet all the needs," he said, although the UN programme could "still do a much better job."
On the approval of Iraqi contracts, Sevan said it was a political process but that the UN humanitarian programme could help speed it up by providing more information.
"What we are trying to do more and more is to try to use our observation services here to try and give assurances to (UN) member states that what is being approved... is being utilised for the specific purposes approved."