The UN World Food Programme’s General Counsel, Bartolomeo Migone, tells In-House Perspective how his team has risen to the challenges posed by the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis and Covid-19.

Bartolomeo Migone always had a strong inkling that he wanted to work in the international sphere.

Born and bred in Italy, the dual Italian-US citizen won a scholarship to attend the last two years of High School at Pearson College – part of the United World Colleges network of schools and educational programmes – in British Columbia, giving him his first taste of life abroad. He went on to study at the London School of Economics, followed by postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia Law School in the US.

After passing the New York Bar, he joined Davis Polk & Wardwell to gain what he describes as ‘hands on’ experience of international law. Little did he know then that those three years spent racking up billable hours on international business and capital markets transactions, M&A deals and project finance would position him so well for his future roles at the United Nations.

‘I was looking to get closer to public interest type work,’ says Migone. ‘The opportunity came up in the form of a position with the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC), which was an organ of the Security Council of the UN that had been established to deal with claims for damages that Iraq caused during the occupation of Kuwait.’

Migone and the team handled some of the largest international claims ever made. This included the $14.7bn the UNCC awarded Kuwait Petroleum Corporation in 2000 to compensate the company for suffering more than two years of oil revenue losses. This was still the UNCC’s largest ever individual pay-out by the time it issued its final compensation award in early 2022. In total, Kuwaiti claimants were compensated more than $52.4bn for losses and damages as a result of the Iraqi invasion.

His next challenge was of an altogether different nature, but equally international. He moved to Citigroup in London in August 2000, where he served for just over a year as Chief of Staff to Renato Ruggiero, the former Director General of the World Trade Organisation. When Ruggiero re-joined Italian politics, Migone knew it was only right that he returned to the legal world.

Migone had a short stint in Geneva handling arbitration and mediation work at another UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization. He then joined a small team of lawyers at an organisation where he felt he could have a lasting impact – the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

‘It was the war chest that was set up by the G8 to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries,’ says Migone, who a short time later was promoted to General Counsel at the Fund. ‘I was there really in its incredibly fast growth stage. The priority was to get money out into programmes, into countries to fight the diseases very quickly. It was a little bit like driving a car fast down the highway while you're building it at the same time.’

After five years at the organisation, focusing primarily on Africa, Migone was ready for a new challenge at the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Having previously relied heavily on legal advice from within the UN and its specialised agency, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, WFP established its own internal legal function in 2005 in response to growing demand for legal advice.

When Migone took the helm as General Counsel in December 2008 there were only 15 lawyers in the team. More than 13 years on, the team has increased three-fold to 45 lawyers alongside an additional 15 paralegals and other support staff.

He says the demands on his team have only increased over this period. ‘Since I joined, the budget of the organisation went from around $3bn a year to almost $10 [bn] last year,’ he says. ‘We are ambitiously pointing for even higher than that this year. Of course, that is a result of things going very poorly in the world. As the need for humanitarian assistance increases, unfortunately, so does our role. The organisation is very much an operational delivery. We are present in approximately 120 countries. We have covered something in the order of 120 million beneficiaries last year. We're pointing towards 150 million in 2022.’

The scope of the team’s work is extensive, from supporting and facilitating the organisation’s operations and procurement of goods and services, to fundraising, establishing and maintaining partnerships with governments, the public sector and, increasingly, the private sector. The team also works closely with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at the country level to help implement programmes on the ground.

‘The organisation has built up its capacity and its reputation by being a leading supply chain actor,’ says Migone. ‘We specialise in purchasing food and in getting it to very far away, very challenging places quickly in a timely fashion in response to emergencies. But we increasingly have been shifting towards cash-based programmes where, instead of providing physical food, we provide cash because it is a more dignified form of assistance. It provides better development opportunities at the local level because you’re stimulating local markets. And it’s also a more dignified choice for the beneficiaries themselves because they are provided with the power to purchase what they need.’

Capacity and supply chains

In recent years, Migone says there has been a strong focus on capacity building to help mitigate the impact of growing pressures on global supply chains. ‘We have always been active in developing country-level resilience, increasing its capacity to deal with shocks when they occur,’ he says. ‘For example, by developing their own supply chain capabilities, by developing safety nets – so basically social security systems that can be leveraged in the event that there is some kind of shock that causes a dramatic increase in the need – and generally in addressing the causes of poverty and food insecurity, which have been very negatively affected by conflict.’

This has been particularly evident since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before the conflict, WFP purchased more than half of its wheat from Ukraine. However, infrastructure challenges and Russia’s blockade of Black Sea ports trapped more than 25,000 tonnes of wheat in Ukraine for months, leaving some 47 million people at risk of acute hunger worldwide.

At the end of July, an UN-brokered deal was finally agreed between Ukraine and Russia to allow the resumption of grain exports through Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

The conflict has caused the global price of grains, including wheat, and other food staples like sunflower oil, to spiral.

‘The Ukraine-Russia crisis has had a dramatic effect on food prices as a result of the obstacles to exportation of food from Ukraine and Russia,’ says Migone. ‘Ukraine is one of the bread baskets of the world, but also there’s the effect that this has had on fuel prices and fertiliser prices. WFP has been affected significantly by that.’

By the beginning of 2022, the price the organisation was paying for food had already increased 30 per cent compared with 2019, while the cost of delivering had risen by $42m a month. Since war broke out in Ukraine, WFP pays around $73.6m – or 44 per cent – more a month for operations than it did in 2019. In June, the agency reported that its annual operational requirements had reached an all-time high of US$22.2bn.

Each crisis brings its own challenges and involves a huge amount of input from the legal team. Advising the organisation on humanitarian access in Ukraine and other conflicts is also something that the legal team regularly gets involved in, says Migone. ‘We’re constantly negotiating humanitarian access to particular areas,’ he says. ‘By we, I mean the organisation, and sometimes this is with government and sometimes with non-state armed groups. We have to talk to everyone. And all those negotiations will happen against a background which is set by principles of international humanitarian law.’

The war in Ukraine has also had a dramatic impact on the geographical scope of WFP’s work. ‘When the invasion occurred, there were massive refugee flows from the country,’ he says. ‘So overnight we set up operations in all the surrounding countries, which were actually some of the few countries in the world where we did not already have clients as we’re focused more on the Global South generally. We now have significant operations across the Ukraine also focusing on some of the contested regions.’

Covid-19 and the climate crisis

The coronavirus pandemic has been one of the other most striking contributors to food insecurity in recent few years. Before Covid-19, the UN estimated there were around 130 million people classed as ‘acutely food insecure’. Since the pandemic, this figure has more than doubled to 276 million.

Migone says the pandemic also created some interesting new challenges for the organisation. ‘One of the things that WFP does is it’s a provider of humanitarian services to other humanitarian providers in the system,’ he says. ‘During Covid, particularly in the early days of the crisis before vaccination, there was a need to provide the conditions for humanitarian actors to continue to operate in contexts in which they could easily catch the virus. We helped establish a whole network of field hospitals that were made available for humanitarian providers.’

He also points to the crucial role of the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS), which WFP manages, and which became one of the most significant airlines in the world while most other airlines were still grounded. ‘This was one of the most significant tasks we were involved [in] because the humanitarians continued to travel around.’

The climate crisis also continues to place enormous pressures on the agency’s work. ‘Climate change is the other big driver of food insecurity,’ says Migone. ‘Climate-based shocks, whether it’s droughts or floods, have been a big challenge.’

This has necessitated helping countries build resilience to help them weather the worst. ‘We respond both to the immediate need that causes, but also trying to address some of the coping mechanisms and rehabilitating the land, creating insurance products that generate a pay-out in the event that drought levels or flood levels are reached,’ he says. ‘Then there is the disbursement of money that can be placed into humanitarian programmes to deal with the consequences.’

One project which Migone particularly enjoyed being involved in was working with the African Union to set up Africa Risk Capacity Replica (ARC) – an innovative climate risk insurance policy established to provide weather-related insurance to African countries.

The initiative was rolled out in 2019 and was designed to protect communities across Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal that were most vulnerable to extreme weather events. The premise, Migone explains, is to finance early responses before they reach catastrophic levels. ‘If rainfall, for example, went below a certain level, a country that had bought this type of insurance from this international organisation would receive a pay-out that would then be tied to an obligation to spend it on humanitarian aid,’ he says.

ARC paid out its first climate risk insurance payment in February 2022. The $7.1m pay-out pledged to support 204,000 people in drought-affected regions of Mali that were already suffering from the impact of long-term conflicts, political instability and the pandemic. ‘As the legal office, that was a real development project that we drew up that was entered into by African states,’ says Migone. ‘That was particularly satisfying because it involved a concrete result and an organisation that is now up and running and exists.’

Reputation management

Like much of the UN, Migone says WFP’s legal office comprises lawyers from a huge array of different legal jurisdictions, backgrounds, and training, which makes it well placed to handle the legal needs of approximately 20,000 employees spanning over 100 countries.

Getting the right processes in place has been key to enabling the organisation to act nimbly when faced with crises. ‘We deal with this generally by making sure that we have tools that can be deployed very quickly that will allow us to help the organisation achieve its goals,’ he says. ‘A lot of work goes into the preparation of the templates that can be deployed quickly and putting in place framework agreements for partnerships that are already there and that can be activated quickly.’

Given the size of the organisation, it’s not surprising that a proportion of the legal office is dedicated to internal governance issues. In 2018, allegations of abuses of power in UN agencies prompted WFP to made sweeping changes to strengthen its policies on harassment, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. It also established a designated committee that reports regularly to the Executive Board on measures and actions related to these issues.

In an email to staff in March 2018, WFP Executive Director David Beasley said: ‘It’s certainly no secret that failure to deal with this sort of misconduct has done great damage to some in the humanitarian sector. The cause of Zero Hunger is too important to put at risk, and that’s why we must have a workplace that prioritises dignity and respect.’

Migone says handling reputation management issues has become a growing focus for his team. ‘The UN, like many other actors at a certain point, had some #MeToo type issues,’ he says. ‘We will be involved in the response team there and making sure that allegations are investigated, and we’ll work with the inspector general's office, which is the in-house investigations capacity.’

He adds that there has been significant focus on developing the most robust policies, response capacities and investigation capacity to ensure that nothing is left unaddressed on this front. ‘When you have 20,000 employees you do occasionally have allegations of sexual harassment and even sexual violence, which need to be dealt with very proactively,’ says Migone.

In 2019, WFP and several other UN agencies were among 40 charities implicated in the ‘sex-for-food’ scandal at refugee camps in West Africa. WFP declined to comment specifically on these reports, but the organisation has repeatedly stressed its zero-tolerance policy towards sexual exploitation and abuse.

In 2020, WFP became the first UN entity to appoint a dedicated Assistant Secretary-General for workplace culture to improve workplace standards and tackle abusive and discriminatory behaviour across the organisation. In 2022, the WFP revised its mechanisms again to prevent and respond to abusive conduct and encourage early reporting and broader protections for victims.

A WFP spokesperson told Global Insight: ‘WFP continues to work closely with the entire UN system to put in place effective prevention and early warning systems to avoid incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and address any allegations swiftly, and on a range of new systems to track, report, and collect data on any allegation of SEA while ensuring the safety and protection of any victim.’

Although Migone didn’t comment specifically on the ‘sex-for-food’ allegations, he concedes that UN agencies had experienced ‘problems of that type’ involving ‘beneficiaries’ and believes that humanitarian organisations have a responsibility to uphold the highest standards. ‘We have a sacred trust to protect those that we’re trying to help,’ he says, ‘so it is especially troubling in our sector if you have any sort of problem of that type and it must be taken very seriously.’

People power

Although the war in Ukraine has had a strong impact on the organisation’s work, Migone says ongoing food security crises in Afghanistan, Yemen and across Africa continue to keep the organisation – and by association his legal team – extremely busy. ‘It’s mind-boggling how many operations [there are] and how big some of them are, affecting millions and millions of people,’ he says.

With so many crises to manage, he says it’s important to keep reviewing the team’s structure and workflow to ensure it’s working as effectively as possible. ‘We are constantly looking at the way we are organised internally to make sure that we’re able to support both the needs of the organisation and the needs of our own colleagues in the legal office to continue learning and develop their careers so that we can continue to attract really good people and retain them,’ he says.

Historically, the team has been primarily based out of Rome and lawyers have travelled to different jurisdictions as and when required. As the demands on WFP continue to change and expand, Migone has embarked on a change management process to determine whether the team may need to adapt its approach.

‘We have a pool of lawyers at the more junior level who are much more flexible in terms of assignment,’ he says. ‘Then we’ve developed subject matter expertise, which ranges from employment law all the way to maritime law because of the transportation of food on the high seas. At the more senior level, we have some greater specialisation there too. As we increase in size, knowledge management has become very important as well, so we're improving those systems and we are beginning a system that sees us assign lawyers to the field. We have one pilot now with a regional bureau that we may, based on the results, roll out globally to other regions as well.’

The scale and gravity of the work the legal team handles could prove too overwhelming for some. But after more than 13 years as General Counsel Migone says he feels more fortunate than ever. ‘It’s our daily reality and we try to help and stay positive,’ he says. ‘Working in the legal office of an organisation like WFP is a privilege and extremely exciting because you're exposed to so many different things that the organisation does.’

In 2020, WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to combat hunger and improve conditions for peace. Migone says the senior management’s reaction to the award is extremely telling about how much each individual employee’s contribution is valued across the organisation. ‘I think everybody here has the feeling that everyone in the organisation really has been part of that,’ he says. ‘The senior management here, beginning with the executive director, were instrumental in really emphasising that point. For example, every member of the organisation was given a jacket pin with the Nobel Peace Prize logo on it. Everyone all the way up and down the hierarchy.’

This inclusive ethos has helped members of his team feel comfortable in the knowledge that they’re part of a wider organisation that’s striving to make such a difference in the world. ‘It’s really in getting a financial intermediary in place that allows the roll-out of a cash programme that sees the organisation putting real cash in beneficiaries’ hands and therefore allowing them to cope with the consequences of some of the shock that has been applied to their country,’ he says.

Migone reflects that this is one of the most rewarding things, in his view, for all members of the team. ‘So many colleagues are alone advising on a transaction that gets something done, but we can all feel that we are a part of it,’ he says.