As world leaders assemble in Johannesburg to debate sustainable development, prospects look worse than grim for Mother Earth. Some of the prescribed solutions will worsen the environmental crisis, while perpetuating the vast gulf between rich and poor. Yet, the Earth, whose life sustaining capacity is rapidly declining under sustained assault from the global economy, can no longer wait for global justice.
Boston Global Action Network
August 30, 2002
The World Summit on Sustainable Development, the once-in-a-decade follow-up to the landmark 1992 Rio Summit is being held over the next two weeks in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Ten years ago at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the world's governments set out an ambitious road map to alleviate poverty while preserving nature from further degradation. However, instead of the decade of sustainable development, the 1990s turned out to be the decade of globalization and consequently a rapidly worsening global environmental crisis and a deepening of human misery on a vast scale.
After the failure to make the necessary changes to our political, economic, and social order over the last decade, this summit represents possibly the last chance to turn around the global economy from its current destructive course. However, in Johannesburg, like at most recent global summits, the worst fears of a wholesale corporate hijacking are coming true.
In the days leading up to the summit, police repression has been intense. Land rights activists, and even veteran anti-apartheid freedom fighters were arrested and viciously tear gassed in jail, while several internationally renowned activists and intellectuals, including Trevor Ngwane, Naomi Klein, Maude Barlow, Njoki Njehu, Tony Clarke, Vandana Shiva, and Oscar Olivera, where caught up in police actions where stun grenades were used on a peaceful candlelight vigil.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is airing its open contempt for the international community by the president refusing to go to Johannesburg. However, as a European Union and United States negotiating document leaked to the press has shown, the lack of his presence has done little to prevent the US and EU delegations from shamelessly advocating using the Earth Summit to promote trade liberalisation and corporate-led globalisation at the expense of environmental protection, poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
Thus new battlelines are being drawn, even while time runs out for the planet, countless species of plants and animals, and humanity's own future. However, whether or not the Summit collapses or muddles through, the fate of the world is destined to be left to all of us "little folk". Now more than ever in human history, we as individuals and collective humanity must take up the struggle for truth and justice, peace and freedom. We must not only challenge ourselves to live simply so that others can simply live, but also challenge the elites who have brought us to the brink. Moreover, we must dedicate ourselves to a lifetime of struggle as only such dedication will save the Earth for future generations.
– RR.082602
Below you will find a compilation of critical articles and links on the largest, most important world summit for a generation. As the full scope of negotiations unfold in Johannesburg it will be vital for the world's people to understand who the major players are, what they want, and their intentions – good or bad, and motives – ulterior or not.
SUMMIT LINKS
NEWS SOURCES
NEWS
An internal European Union-United States joint document obtained by the Council of Canadians demonstrates that the World Summit for Sustainable Development is fast becoming a new round for an international trade agreement, rather than a conference on how to face the environmental and social problems the world is facing.
COC, Leaked negotiating document (8/27/2002)
http://www.canadians.org/news_updates.htm?COC_token=024KA24&step=2&id=35
The real level of world inequality and environmental degradation may be far worse than official estimates, according to a leaked document prepared for the world's richest countries and seen by the Guardian.
Ecological decline 'far worse' than official estimates (8/26/2002)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldsummit2002/story/0,12264,780730,00.html
While such wealthy nations as the United States continue to press the developing world to open its markets to free trade and turn over public utilities, such as water and electricity, to private companies to curb environmental abuses and improve basic service delivery, poor countries say their efforts have been undermined by the industrialized world's hypocrisy and corporate approach.
Jon Jeter, Rich, Poor Further Apart (8/25/02)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0825-02.htm
The tough government stance is fueling tensions and creating alliances among a variety of groupings ranging from disenchanted volunteers at the summit who are protesting their day rate, landless people, workers, those protesting government's stance on HIV and women and high service charges to the poor. Mayela said, "Freedom of expression as provided for in the constitution has been violated. This is not a true reflection of democracy, we will now demonstrate every day."
ENS, Arrests, Teargassing Mar World Summit Preparations (8/24/2002)
http://ens-news.com/ens/aug2002/2002-08-22-03.asp
NGO REPORTS
Part of the preparatory process was the so called 'Multi Stakeholder Dialogue'. This process, which is supposed to represent the input of Civil Society did not seem to have any influence on the outcome of the Summit. It turned out to be an effective way of curbing voices that oppose the current neo-liberal policies, forcing the input of social movements through a consensus mechanism that excludes any expression of our analysis and proposals.
Landless Workers' Movement, WSSD turns out to be Doha (7/11/2002)
http://www.mstbrazil.org/20020715_228.html
The key focus of the World Summit will be on forming public-private partnerships as a means to deliver sustainable development, including the provision of basic services such as water, education and health. Yet Save the Children's report shows that the increased involvement of the private sector in delivering such basic services is likely to have a negative impact on the equity, quality and capacity of these services to combat poverty and fulfil children's rights.
Save the Children UK, Summit could increase child poverty (8/21/2002)
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/pressrels/210802.html
Christian Aid this week launches a report showing the need to regulate multi-national companies. Internationally binding laws must be established to hold companies to human rights and environmental standards, it says. The report highlights how multi-national corporations have clubbed together to try to hijack the conference agenda for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), which opens next week in Johannesburg. This powerful, and expensive, lobbying appears to have worked.
Christian Aid, big business must be regulated (8/20/2002)
http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/news/media/pressrel/020820p.htm
OVERVIEWS
In the last few weeks three major international organisations have warned that the Earth's capacity for regeneration is on the verge of being exhausted. Time is not on our side. It is all the more tragic therefore that the UN and its member governments have allowed this once in a decade opportunity to be squandered. The two previous summits, in Stockholm and Rio, were derailed by global corporate interests, keen to remove from the agenda any mention of their own complicity in the worlds' growing problems and the same interests have succeeded in co-opting Johannesburg.
The Ecologist warns UN of fatal compromise (8/13/2002)
http://www.theecologist.org/press_view.html?id=13
The message rang clear: "Free trade" and globalization, as embodied by the WTO, NAFTA, World Bank and IMF policies and corporate investment practices, undermine democracy, local economies, ecological sustainability, human rights and labor rights. The voice and message of this movement, which has increasingly been echoed by more mainstream critics of the global economy, finds itself diametrically opposed to the corporate-inspired Earth Summit mantra that open markets are a prerequisite for sustainable development. Instead, it has begun to develop an alternative vision-one that is inspired by the slogan "another world is possible."
CorpWatch, From Rio to Johannesburg: The Globalization Decade (7/24/2002)
http://www.corpwatch.org/campaigns/PCD.jsp?articleid=3190
Today, the Earth Summit is stillborn, killed over a year before it was due to be held by George W Bush's decision to abandon the Kyoto Climate Change protocol. This is capitalism stripped of its human face, and revealed as an enemy of nature. Japanese and European elites may seem upset, but what they are most upset about is the American's frank acknowledgment that the continued expansion of the production system they share, requires an accelerated consumption of nature. Johannesburg will see a mixture of corporate green-washing, American bullying, European holier-than-thou posturing, third world leaders begging for aid in return for more pro-corporate liberalisation, and the WTO hijacking the environment in the service of free trade. It is one more UN conference bound for ignominious failure.
Red Pepper (Walden Bello), Views on the Earth Summit (9/2002)
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/x-earthsummit-views.html
COMMENTARIES
The World Summit on Sustainable Development isn't going to save the world; it merely offers an exaggerated mirror of it. In the gourmet restaurants of Sandton, delegates are literally dining out on their concern for the poor. Meanwhile, outside the gates, poor people are being hidden away, assaulted and imprisoned for what has become the iconic act of resistance in an unsustainable world: refusing to disappear.
Naomi Klein, Booby Traps at Rio + 10 (9/16/2002)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020916&s=klein
We are told that Colin Powell will go to Johannesburg in the president's place, and in many administrations the secretary of state would be viewed as a reasonable substitute. However it is clear by now that Powell has next to no influence on core policy objectives, and tends to be sent along - often against his will - to deal with international problems that the White House has no interest in, or expectation of, resolving. Such as the Middle East, or global warming.
Julian Borger, Why Bush Will Not Attend the Earth Summit (8/21/2002)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldsummit2002/story/0,12264,778294,00.html
In addition to debt relief, leaders of developed nations need to show up at the summit with their checkbooks open, ready and willing to put up the hard cash necessary to solve this problem. This money is urgently needed to provide economic alternatives to ecologically destructive activities, help stabilize population, purchase protections on threatened ecological habitat, enforce environmental laws and treaties, develop sustainable energy and food production systems, restore damaged ecosystems and reduce poverty and waste.
Richard Steiner, Sustain the Planet That Sustains Us (8/21/2002)
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0821-06.htm
The delegates who will gather for the summit travel with great hopes. But these will come to nothing if national egotism, the fetishism of growth, the logic of the market and the law of profit are allowed to take over. That was what happened during the preparatory conference in Bali in June. As a result it was unable to adopt a plan of action for sustainable development and ended in stalemate.
Iganicio Ramonet, Saving the Planet (8/2002)
http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/08/01edito
To simply tinker with an unjust and oppressive system will lead to a failure of the WSSD. The struggle at the Summit and beyond, will be to reconstruct a world of equity, global rule of law and sustainability.
Firoz Osman, Reasons for Skepticism (8/16/2002)
http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=2224
The summiteers are left wondering how they can hope to achieve anything if the world's sole superpower is at best barely engaged and, at worst, outright hostile? And this poses a wider challenge: for what can the nations of the world do in any sphere if the US refuses to play the international game?
Jonathan Freedland, Greens don't need the US (8/16/2002)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldsummit2002/story/0,12264,775542,00.html
The world is definitely experiencing a clash of cultures, but not along the fault lines of civilizations as Samuel Huntington has suggested. The opposing cultural trends that are most dominant are between those who define the world in terms of the value of massive accumulation and immediate use of resources (powerful individuals, corporations and the national governments that provide a haven for them) and those who define the world in terms of shared rights and responsibilities for life and future generations (most of the world's people).
David Krieger, Peace & Sust. Dev. Will Rise or Fall Together (8/15/2002)
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0815-08.htm
Like all the brave concepts offered up by environmentalists, sustainable development was doomed to go the way of the rest of the treacherous lexicon of developmentalism - empowerment, participation, poverty-abatement, inclusiveness, and so on: ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to privilege. Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear; what originally meant adjusting the industrial technosphere so that it should not destroy the planet has now come to indicate the regenerative power of the economy, no matter how it may degrade the "environment". Sustainable is what the rich and powerful can get away with.
Jeremy Seabrook, Sustainable Development is a Hoax (8/5/2002)
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0805-05.htm
The widening gap between rhetoric and reality that has transformed sustainable development into an irrelevant buzz phrase now threatens to turn the WSSD into tragic farce.
Kevin Watkins, Greed is Good (7/27/2002)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=2154
The orgy of partnerships at the WSSD (and almost every other major multilateral event of late) might make us want to think again about Margaret Mead's oft-quoted soundbite in the activist world: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, its the only thing that ever has." Although this slogan has been recited as a hard-times mantra by embattled progressives the world over, it's important to remember that it's a double-edged slogan. The Bank is, after all, a small group of thoughtful committed citizens. It's just that their politics are repugnant.
Raj Patel, Faulty Shade of Green (7/22/02)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=2127