Spanish
On Monday, UNESCO acknowledged the logistical and financial inability to process the growing volume of applications it receives annually to protect intangible heritage, with a system that has reached its limit and which, without new funds, it will be impossible to accelerate the pace of inscriptions demanded by emerging powers.
"The problem we are facing is the workload that all these inscription proposals represent. The work that must be done with a view to an inscription is particularly time-consuming in terms of hours of work with the advisors and the secretariat," said UNESCO's Deputy Director-General for Culture, Ernesto Ottone, in response to demands from the local press about the slowness of the process.
The statement was made at a press conference for the opening of the 20th session of the Intergovernmental Committee in New Delhi, to cool the expectations of countries that demand to break the rule that limits each State to submit only one file per year.
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UNESCO, which will examine 68 new nominations this year, is currently operating at the limit of its technical capacity. The evaluation process for each tradition requires rigorous analysis to ensure its viability and protection, a task that the organization cannot scale with its current budget. "As long as we don't have more financial support for the maintenance of the Convention, I tell you that it will be difficult to have more inscription proposals each year," assured the senior official, who compared the situation to the management of a massive sporting event that has overflowed. "It's a bit like organizing a major sporting event, such as the World Cup. You see that year after year there are more participants, but we have a restriction: the time at our disposal and the human resources to carry out the process," he illustrated. The debate over the quota system is recurrent, and countries with vast cultural inventories, such as India or China, consider that the limit of one annual candidacy is insufficient to reflect their diversity. However, UNESCO warned that the current capacity is between 45 and 60 annual files, a figure that has only been slightly exceeded in this edition. "Simply, we do not have the capacity to foresee more than 60 registrations per year," Ottone stated. The Assistant Director-General recalled that the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has been a victim of its own success, becoming the "most ratified treaty in a very short time of the entire United Nations system", with 185 States Parties in just two decades.
