By Lisa Macdonald
The United Nations' first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 produced a lot of rhetoric about the severity of the global environment crisis, but virtually no action. The second summit, held in New York at the end of June, not only produced no plans for action; the representatives of the 180 participating countries could not even agree on the rhetoric. The proposed joint statement — containing such gross understatements as "the overall outlook for sustainable development is not much better today than it was in 1992" and the state of the global environment "has continued to deteriorate" — was not endorsed by the summit.
Despite the hopes of environmentalists, the failure of these summits to reach any meaningful agreement on the need, let alone measures, to halt the global environment crisis was inevitable.
From the first summit, it was clear that implementing the sort of change required just to slow — let alone halt or reverse — environmental destruction, was never on the agenda. After millions of dollars and years of preparatory negotiations, Rio produced:
- <~>the UN's toothless Commission on Sustainable Development;
- <~>a climate treaty that contained no targets or timetables (carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has since increased from 356 to 364 parts per million);
- <~>a biodiversity treaty that focused on the commercial exploitation and patenting of living organisms rather than on protecting threatened species (since then between 43,000 and 131,000 more species have become extinct);
- <~>a desertification convention that has not been heard of since;
- <~>the beginnings of a forests convention in which nothing much was agreed to; and
- <~>300 pages of vague, still unfunded proposals in Agenda 21, which omits discussion of key environmental issues such as disarmament, the First World-Third World wealth gap and international trade.
The Greenpeace activists who defied the high security at Rio to drop a giant banner depicting the Earth and the single word "SOLD" summed it up.
Greenwashing
It is not just in terms of outcomes that we can judge the real purpose of these summits. Long before Rio, all efforts to force issues fundamental to environmental destruction — Third World debt, the activities of transnational corporations, poverty and militarism — onto Rio's official agenda were rejected by all First World governments, often with the support of Third World elites.
Big business controlled the political agenda, forced the shelving of proposals for regulating transnational corporations and had any critical assessment of its role in environmental destruction removed from Agenda 21.
Rio was more than a case of damage control by big business, however. It was a massive exercise in corporate greenwashing. It diverted ecology activists' energy and resources away from grassroots campaigning and defused, at least temporarily, much of the growing public anger at the rapidly deteriorating state of our air, land and water.
Five years later, despite the existence of more than 2000 local Agenda 21 groups which sprang up around the world following Rio, there was not even a struggle over the agenda at Earth Summit II. The "big issues", such as Third World poverty, the greenhouse effect and toxic waste, around which there was at least the pretence of attention at Rio, were either ignored or "redefined" as less urgent.
Despite the clear consensus among scientists that greenhouse is real, for example, US President Bill Clinton (among others) refused to agree to a precise target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, saying that he still needed to "convince the American people and the Congress that the climate change problem is real and imminent".
It is not an "ignorant" US public that Clinton is pandering to — the majority are already convinced, according to opinion polls. It is the tiny minority of big corporate owners who refuse to change their behaviour.
Profitability
Transnational corporations now account for half of all oil, gas and coal extraction, refining and marketing; over 50% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions; almost all ozone-depleting compounds. They control 80% of land dedicated to export agriculture. Just 20 transnationals control over 90% of all pesticide sales and a huge fraction of the world's seed stocks.
The implementation of Agenda 21 would have cost these corporations and the governments that subsidise them an estimated US$600 billion a year, of which the advanced industrialised countries were asked to supply $126 billion.
This $125 billion is only 0.7% of the combined domestic products of the advanced capitalist economies. It is only a small fraction of the world's annual military budget.
It is far less than the trillion dollars that, according to a 1994 UN study, the world's governments waste each year on "environmentally damaging subsidies". And it is no more than First World governments committed themselves to allocate to Third World aid at the UN more than a decade ago.
The corporate and government decision makers in the industrialised countries have not only refused to meet their Agenda 21 funding commitments.
Since the Rio summit, they have further hindered Third World countries' ability to deal with environmental problems. Overseas aid has been cut by 20%, to less than 0.21% of First World GDP, and Third World debt has increased from US$1662 billion to $2000 billion in 1996.
In the face of looming ecological and human catastrophe, the intransigence of the corporate owners and their political representatives can be explained only if it is understood that the capitalist economic system makes any hindrance to corporations' struggle for commercial supremacy or their accumulation of profits an anathema.
In order to compete successfully, capitalists produce whatever goods and services and use whatever production, disposal and distribution methods will reduce their costs and maximise their profits. The fact that these products and methods are devastating the environment isn't a consideration for them.
Democratic control
With the rise of the ecology movement and mass environmental consciousness since the 1970s, however, corporations and capitalist governments have been forced to be seen to be doing something to clean up the mess they are creating.
Even the massive environmental destruction revealed in the former Soviet Union by the collapse of Stalinism did not hide for long the link between global environmental degradation and capitalism. The capitalist powers confronted growing demands for the replacement of profit-driven production and trade by people- and environment-centred development.
Thus, the first Earth Summit became an elaborate media conference in which the capitalist governments doffed their hats to public concern and the World Bank launched its Global Environment Facility, purchasing environmental legitimacy for one of the world's most ecologically destructive institutions.
At the second summit, the farce continued. On the third day, the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced an alliance to acquire, by 2005, 50 million hectares of forests for "protection".
Ignoring the massive ongoing deforestation caused by the World Bank's imposition of savage debt repayment schedules and structural adjustment programs on the Third World, this charade was promoted as "the biggest single attempt to protect forests yet made".
The still accelerating pace of ecological destruction testifies to the lack of any real change. While some capitalists have been able to find a profitable market niche producing environmentally sound goods and services, this will never comprise more than a tiny proportion of production in a system driven by inter-capitalist competition.
And while some legislative initiatives forced on governments by the environment movement have resulted in a slightly slower pace of some types of pollution and deforestation in some First World countries, the ecological crisis is worsening in the Third World, impacting on the planet as a whole.
For so long as they are convened and run by big business and its governing institutions — national and international — conferences such as the Earth Summits will produce no decisions or actions which seriously address the crisis. Their purpose is to buttress and legitimise the capitalist status quo, not confront, condemn or weaken it.
Only when the immediate decisions about what must be done, and the longer term decisions about what is produced and how, are made democratically by society as a whole will we have a chance of environmental sustainability.