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Earth Summit Negotiators Hit Deadlock on 14 Issues
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Bush snubbed the summit
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JOHANNESBURG,
August 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Negotiators at the Earth
Summit were deadlocked Friday, August 30, 2002, on a blueprint to
empower the desperately poor of the world and reduce mankind's ravages
of the planet as thousands of militants prepared to march in
Johannesburg to demand action.
Interminable
squabbles between big business and environmentalists and divisions
between the rich and poor have so far dominated the Summit with eight
days left to formulate a panacea to reduce global poverty and protect
the environment.
The
splits on 14 key issues in the 71-page "Plan for
Implementation" pit rich countries against poor and the United
States against Europe, delegates said, reported Agence France-Presse
(AFP).
U.S.
President George W. Bush is snubbing the summit, but 109 other heads
of state and government will start arriving Sunday, September 1, to
break the impasse.
"If
we fail here, things would unravel on a scale that we have not seen
before in international negotiations," British Deputy Prime
Minister John Prescott told The Independent newspaper of London in an
interview published Friday.
"That
would be tragic for the whole world and most of all for those who are
in poverty and despair."
"World
leaders are in danger of sleep walking right into an environmental
catastrophe," warned the conservation group WWF, saying the
summit "seems to be moving backwards."
Danish
Environment Minister Hans Christian Schmidt, whose country currently
chairs the European Union, warned: "The process slowed
down."
"We
must be dedicated to results... especially on time-bound targets like
sanitation, renewable energy."
Other
deadlocks include human rights, which the Europeans say are
non-negotiable, but on which the United States is siding with the
Third World in seeking flexibility, globalization, greater market
access for developing countries; and the "precautionary
principle" adopted at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in
1992 and under which no new technologies should be introduced if
scientists are unsure about any harmful side-effects.
Schmidt
said targets and timetables for alleviating poverty were important for
the EU, as was boosting renewable energy sources.
The
Europeans push for a target of halving the number of people without
access to decent sanitation by 2015 and to increase use of renewable
energy sources such as windmills and solar power to 15 percent of the
total by 2010 - goals the United States is resisting.
"I
cannot understand how countries can disagree - 2.2 million people die
every year because of poor sanitation," said Schmidt in a
transparent reference to the Americans.
Developing
countries are split on these targets, fearing they might be obliged to
spend huge sums on improving sanitation, even if donors help, and
members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) do
not want to see oil replaced by other energy sources.
Improving
the access of developing countries to the markets of industrialized
nations and the question of the huge subsidies paid to American and
European farmers are such explosive subjects that they will be left
for the heads of state and government to deal with, diplomats said.
Evidence
is, meanwhile, growing linking global warming and the floods and
droughts that devastated parts of Asia and Europe this year, the head
of the United Nations' body on climate change said.
Rajendra
Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
said there was undeniable proof that the Earth was warming.
Scientists
told journalists at the summit they were striving to determine whether
these higher temperatures had already wreaked climate change,
including extreme weather events, he said, adding, "I think the
evidence is becoming stronger that a lot of these extreme events are
part of the overall process of climate change."
As
many as 20,000 protestors are expected to join several marches, to
take place on Saturday, on a route that will take them to the
negotiation venue - a convention center in the plush, predominantly
white Johannesburg suburb of Sandton.
The
complex, declared UN territory for the duration of the 10-day summit
that began Monday, has been turned into a fortress, ringed by steel
and concrete barricades and patrolled by thousands of armed police and
soldiers, with guard dogs, anti-riot trucks and bomb-squad teams in
reserve.
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