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Negotiators at the Earth Summit debate environment issues
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JOHANNESBURG,
Aug 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Efforts to craft the Earth
Summit's blueprint for tackling global poverty and environmental
damage were bogged Tuesday in textual battles over farm subsidies,
trade, energy and development goals.
Negotiators admitted they had made scant headway toward clearing away
a thicket of brackets - diplomacy-speak for contested text - in an
array of issues that have pitched the United States against the
European Union, and both against the developing world.
And despite criticism the huge conference will generate only empty
promises, the United Nations’ head of the World Summit,
Secretary-General Nitin Desai, has pledged action against poverty,
reports CNN.
Saying
the Johannesburg summit had a better chance of success than the Rio de
Janeiro summit 10 years earlier because it was building on agreements
made two years ago - such as halving hunger and poverty by 2015, Desai
commented to South African public radio on the summit’s second day,
"This conference will be different…The focus is very much on
action."
At
the summit's heart is a so-called Plan of Implementation for reviving
recommendations that have been mostly ignored for the past decade and
for meeting new goals trumpeted at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000.
These,
according to various sources, are the main stumbling blocks:
- FARM SUBSIDIES: The United States, Japan and the EU oppose tough
wording putting pressure on them to dismantle agriculture support
estimated by the World Bank to amount to nearly a billion dollars a
day.
Those subsidies have been blamed for sapping the livelihood of poor
farmers and for encouraging reckless water extraction and soil
erosion.
"Agriculture is one of the most difficult issues,"
acknowledged Poul Nielson, European commissioner for development and
humanitarian aid.
The EU will insist that the text go no further than the commitments it
made at the World Trade Organization (WTO) round of talks in Doha last
November, he said.
In those talks, rich countries agreed to a three-year program of
negotiations on agriculture "without prejudging the outcome of
the negotiations".
The goal is a widening of poor countries' access to rich markets,
phasing out all forms of export subsidies and a
"substantial" reduction in domestic aid for farmers.
- DEVELOPMENT AID: The United States and other rich countries are
opposed to strong wording that would spur them to boost levels of
official development aid to 0.7 percent of gross domestic product
(GDP), a promise they confirmed at a summit in Monterey, Mexico, this
year.
"The issues of farm subsidies and official development aid, both
of which are priorities for Latin America, will be very difficult and
the talks will go down to the wire," said Venezuelan Environment
Minister Ana Elisa Osorio, whose country chairs the Group of 77 bloc
of developing countries.
- DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT TARGETS: The E.U. and U.S. remain far
apart over plans to set a date for helping the world's poorest gain
access to sewerage and electricity and for slowing the rate of species
loss.
Nielson said the E.U. would not budge on its demand for targets and
timetables.
"This is an operational way of showing that we want another
balance between market and society. The E.U. is not accepting the
market as the only way of doing things," he said.
- ENERGY: Another E.U.-U.S. clash. The Europeans want to set 2010 as
the goal for having renewable sources meet 15% of the world's energy
needs, while President George W. Bush's administration wants no date
at all.
A compromise document has two options, aligned on the two respective
positions, according to World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Jennifer Morgan.
She said that the proposed 2010 option would be
"meaningless" as it would include environmentally
destructive big hydro projects.
Not all was gloomy, though.
South African Trade Minister Alec Erwin said he believed agreements on
trade, investment and agriculture would emerge by next Monday, the eve
of a three-day summit by government chiefs.
"We are still in the early stages," Erwin said. "We are
making good progress and I am confident we will have an
agreement."
Japanese spokesman Kiyotaka Akasaka said the United States had yielded
to demands to set 2020 as a deadline for better management of
hazardous chemicals.
"With this new flexible attitude of the U.S., we might be able to
make progress. We are hopeful that by the end of this week, the Plan
of Implementation will be completed, he said.
European delegates, though, said that the chemicals deadline was
really a minor card in a poker game likely to be played out for days
to come.
The Plan of Implementation is a non-binding document, but is
considered important, as it will mould the environmental agenda for
the next decade.
