By Kristin Dawkins
It was 5 p.m. on one of the last days of the third month-long preparatory negotiations for the "Earth Summit", the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) that will be finalised in Rio de Janeiro next June.
Karen Plaut, a student of Stanford University and a delegate to UNCED, spoke. "It has been embarrassing for me to be here and watch the US delegation ignore the international consensus by refusing to establish targets and time lines to reduce climate change. I speak for many young people in the US who have begun to wonder whether our government is basing its decisions on a safe approach to the 1992 elections rather than a sincere commitment to sustainable development and environmental protection."
Plaut's statement was followed by similarly blunt words from four other regions of the world — all members of the Student Environmental Action Coalition — condemning the economic model that is destroying the planet and spreading poverty throughout the world.
Karen and I were among at least 230 representatives of non-governmental organisations officially accredited to participate in the third UNCED Preparatory Committee session, held in August in Geneva. Over and over, people from all over the world wanted to know what we were doing to change the way the Bush administration was single-handedly blocking the progress of these negotiations.
Perhaps most outrageous was the attempt by administration officials to elevate free markets to the level of "general principles" that might become part of the Earth Charter. "UNCED principles should reflect the central role that market mechanisms play to achieve sustainable development", pronounced the US government in an official statement on August 20.
The NGO Working Group on Poverty and Affluence, made up of the most progressive participants in the Geneva meeting, answered back, "If a free market is desired, then it has to be freed from the control of the transnational corporations, through regulation by governments ... Trade is not absolutely good. Trade in slaves, drugs, arms or endangered species is bad even though it does generate a great deal of economic activity ... In recent decades, millions of farmers responded to market incentives, converting their land to export crops and joining the global commodities markets. When these markets were deregulated, the farmers were left more vulnerable than before."
Market strategies pushed by the industrialised countries to increase the export of raw logs can mean environmental degradation, extinction of animal species, and loss of jobs in wood processing industries. Contrary to the official US position, the opening of markets to increase exports in a world of finite resources is not a strategy to achieve sustainable development.
My last evening in Geneva, I witnessed a dramatic debate on > negotiator Gerald Kamens and representatives of Zimbabwe, India and other countries. The draft text read, "the alleviation of poverty is crucial for sustainable development". Zimbabwe's Margaret Mukakanana proposed that the world's goal should be the "eradication" of poverty instead of mere "alleviation". The US government said no. According to its logic, eradicating poverty is not "crucial" to achieve sustainable development, and so it would be incorrect to make "eradication" a goal of UNCED.
Although President George Bush is expected to join the heads of state of more than 100 countries next June in Rio to sign whatever agreements may be achieved at UNCED, the US negotiators seem to be working hard to ensure that there won't be any agreements of consequence.
Take, for instance, the proposed treaty on global warming. In its official Statement on Atmosphere, the US complained that key UNCED documents "focus almost exclusively ... on recommendations to address one environmental issue — climate change — through one sector — energy" as if oblivious to findings that energy use as a sector of world economic activity will contribute more than three-quarters of the total global warming impact for the period 1985-2100.
Furthermore, the US statement went on, "Any discussion of policy recommendations, if focussed on climate change, necessarily duplicates and potentially pre-empts the work of the INC [the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change]."
What they didn't say is that they are blocking progress here, too. In the latest talks, the administration refused to accept specific limitations on its carbon dioxide emissions despite the willingness of almost every other country to do so. So what may be signed in Rio will probably be limited to a "framework convention", essentially just an agreement to talk some more.
The forests agreement, too, will probably be limited to a statement of principles. Malaysia's ambassador Ting Wen Lian caused an uproar in March, arguing that a forests treaty should require a minimum level of forest cover for each country — "particularly the developed countries that have undergone extensive deforestation".
The developing countries make it quite clear that what they need is the one thing the US won't put on the table: financing in addition to existing foreign aid programs — enabling them to comply with the terms of a new treaty. Indeed, developing countries regard such financing as less a question of aid than of compensation for national and local sacrifices to be made on behalf of the global environment.
The Latin American NGOs took this concept of compensation another step forward, asking UNCED to consider the actual losses caused by exploitation in the past. Their document, entitled "External Debt and Ecological Debt", signed by 21 NGO representatives of eight Latin American nations, proposed that external debt be swapped for the region's ecological and social losses derived from colonialism and past exploitative foreign investment. US insistence on the World Bank as the administrator of any environmental and development funds also worries the NGOs and nations of the South. They know well the effects of World Bank-sponsored boondoggles that displace villages, eliminate habitats of rare species and destroy the ecological balance of vast regions, in addition to constraining local economies through austerity budgets and spiralling debt.
[Abridged from In These Times (US).]