Topic:
Country: Syrian Arab Republic
Delegate Name: Nandan Narayanan
Committee: General Assembly – UN International Olympic committee
Topic A: Mitigating Negative Impacts on Host Cities
Country: Syria
Delegate: Nandan Narayanan
Greenhills High School
Although the Olympics does provide a sense of excitement and patriotism for its nation and its host city, it does provide many problems for the country’s economy and infrastructure. An event as large as the Olympics needs a lot of space and requires a lot of planning. Many of the cities do not have that big space. Thus it leads to evictions, congestion, rising land-rent value as well as the rise in food prices. Although people with a stable source of income can see the Olympics as a grand event, people on the impoverished side face eviction as they use that land as parking spaces and Olympic stadiums. The nation’s economy also takes a hit. It is estimated that the 2021 Tokyo Olympics cost around 15.4 Billion dollars. That could have built 1,200 elementary schools. This shows how there is a change in where the flow of money is headed. While the money could be used to improve infrastructure and help build schools, the government is forced to divert that money into making stadiums and providing for the athletes.
Syria recently had a devastating earthquake that hurt our people very much. It requires us to divert our funds to rescue and rebuild our economy. However, the delegation of Syria is very interested and believes that mitigating the negative impacts on host cities is very important. As a solution, we could divert funds from the UN toward the host country of the Olympics. This way, it prevents the host country from diverting its own funds to build stadiums and parking spaces. However, the Syrian Government cannot help provide funds due to the recent earthquake. We believe that we need to focus our efforts on helping survivors and rebuilding our infrastructure.
