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Will the Earth Summit save the world? |
Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza, currently moored in Cape Town, pursued a ship transporting a cargo of plutonium to the high seas of the Southern Ocean this weekend. It is to the high seas of Johannesburg that thousands of delegates flocked to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).
Final preparations are underway for the historic WSSD that started today, August 26th, 2002, in Johannesburg. Individuals, non-governmental organizations and indigenous peoples groups are already in Johannesburg this week where a number of parallel events, such as the Global People’s Forum, Biopiracy Summit, and the World Sustainability Hearings, have started.
Stockholm 1972, Rio de Janeiro 1992, Johannesburg 2002
Thirty years after the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the world gathered in Johannesburg to revitalize global commitment to sustainable development. The WSSD, Rio+10 or World Summit as it has become known, will primarily evaluate progress in the implementation of the various commitments entered into at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development were not only the product of deliberations in Rio, but also the result of two decades of international consultations. One of the primary tasks of the WSSD will be to assess the extent to which countries have adopted Agenda 21 in their policies and programs.
Agenda 21 is an action plan that outlines key policies and conventions for achieving sustainable development. The World Summit will assess the key gaps in the policies and conventions. It will also seek to develop “a political declaration on sustainability, a plan of implementation which sets firm targets to deliver on the goals articulated at Rio and recognise voluntary commitments between different players at the WSSD.”
One of the key themes of the Summit will be the eradication of poverty. South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Valli Moosa said that poverty “poses a great threat to all nations as the instability, conflict, disease and environmental degradation associated with poverty threaten the overall socio-economic fibre of our planet.”
There are more poor people today than there were in 1972. The gaps between the rich and the poor, the landed and the landless, those with technology and those without are widening. Many concerns were raised by civil society center on the increase and persistence in poverty. Namely, how do we ensure that not only the nature of poverty but also the root causes thereof are addressed at the World Summit?
Conferences, workshops and symposia have not brought us any closer to lessening the gap between the rich and the poor. Close to 50 major international conferences have been held since 1972. These have dealt with food security, women, children, housing, the environment and trade. One leading development practitioner recently said, “Every time we hold a conference we promise more, and we do less.” What then can we hope to achieve in Johannesburg?
United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has stated that “Progress towards the goals established at Rio has been slower than anticipated and in some respects conditions are worse than they were ten years ago.” There is widespread agreement that the Rio processes have not achieved their goals.
At the last preparatory committee for the WSSD held in Bali, Indonesia tensions between the aggressive trade liberalization and corporate-led globalisation of the 1990s and the people-centred declarations of the Earth Summit, were evident.
Partnership building is being mooted as one of the key strategies of the action plan to be concluded in Johannesburg. Yet, global inequality is perpetuated by the trade strategies of richer nations and multi-national corporations. A standoff between richer and poorer nations is unavoidable. It was unavoidable in Rio and it will be inevitable in Johannesburg.
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A protester opposed to the summit yells at a policeman during a demonstration in Johannesburg
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A protester opposed to the summit yells at a policeman during a demonstration in Johannesburg Environmental activists are uniting under slogans such as “Don’t let big business rule the world” and are making their discontent known. Some have warned that the Summit could end up as “Rio-10” if the voices of the poor, hungry, landless and sick are silenced again. Ricardo Navarro, Chair of Friends of the Earth International, a network of over one million grass-root organizations, said that civil society would use this strength to show that citizens expect governments to bring economic globalization under control.
According to the International Forum on Globalisation, “As long as global institutions and national governments simultaneously attempt to pursue economic globalisation, no goals for a healthy planet, or equity and justice for people, are remotely achievable.” As it turns out, one of the key proponents of economic globalization, U.S. President George W. Bush, will not be attending the Summit. Secretary of State Colin Powell is there in his stead.
Bush has emerged as an environmental pariah due to his decisions, on both domestic and international fronts, toward environmental safeguards. Most notable on the international front has been the U.S. refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which set time-bound limits for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries. His decision to stay home at his holiday ranch instead of attending the World Summit has established Bush as an “environmental laggard.”
On the domestic front, Gregory Wetstone, Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of advocacy, calls the Bush administration the most anti-environmental presidential administration. “There is no mistaking the trend. On issue after issue, federal agencies have been promoting the agenda of corporate polluters at the expense of our clean air, clean water, protected lands and forests, and even our planet’s climate.”
While Bush officially declared his absence, many feel that the agenda of corporate globalization is already imprinted on the WSSD.
This is evident in impasse in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and the weakening of several other processes that will deal with biosafety, pollutants, ozone depletion and hazardous waste. Furthermore, voluntary public-private sector partnerships, a la Bush, have been bandied about frequently as an alternative to legally binding commitments proposed by the Rio Declaration in 1992.
Bush may not be there in person but corporate globalization proponents will be hard at work diluting the outcomes of the WSSD. One could dismiss the WSSD as another “global circus,” which is what one delegate labeled the recently convened World Food Summit. Yet these summits are key in determining the landscape in which we negotiate access to rights and resources. They also provide opportunities to alter the course of our ship, which has been pirated by the unscrupulous who value profits above the planet and its people.
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