Posted on 10-4-2002
US
Hijacking UN Summit?
Story by Irwin Arieff, REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
UNITED NATIONS - Environmental groups last week accused the
United States
and oil exporting nations of trying to gut a global action plan
for
environmentally friendly development to be adopted at a U.N.
summit in South
Africa. Organizers of the World Summit on Sustainable Development,
opening
in Johannesburg in August, acknowledged the meeting could fall
far short of
what they had hoped, but said it could still succeed if governments
wanted.
Greenpeace International accused Washington of trying to use
the conference
to dismantle "more than three decades of international efforts
to protect
the environment, enhance social justice and ensure economic
opportunities
for all. "The United States' only vision is that this planet
should be run
like a business park," Greenpeace's Remi Parmentier told a news
conference
at U.N. headquarters.
Daniel Mittler of Friends of the Earth International blamed
Washington -
with help from Canada, Australia and OPEC countries including
Saudi Arabia
and Venezuela - for "two weeks of chaotic negotiations resulting
in a long
document, strong on platitudes but weak on substance." Mittler
urged
governments preparing for the Johannesburg conference to "chuck
the fluff"
from the action plan as it now stood and drastically rewrite
it. A U.S.
official dismissed the criticisms, saying Washington was working
hard to
make the conference a success and shared the groups' desire
for a healthy
environment "although we may disagree on the tactics to get
there. "You can
have a safe and healthy environment and develop at the same
time. We are a
good example of that," said the official, speaking on condition
of
anonymity. "We also produce a lot of pollution but we are working
hard to
reduce it."
10 YEARS AFTER EARTH SUMMIT
The 10-day summit opening Aug. 26 is expected to draw thousands
from
government, business and interest groups to Johannesburg along
with
delegations from most of the United Nations' 189 member-nations.
It was
timed to fall 10 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,
which
adopted "Agenda 21," a blueprint for balancing the world's economic
and
social needs with its environmental resources. Organizers say
part of the
problem is that, even at this stage, they have a hard time saying
precisely
what the conference is intended to achieve.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has described it as an environmental
conference teamed with a strategy meeting on how to achieve
broad
development goals set out by the world body at its 2000 millennium
summit.
The millennium goals include halving the number of people living
on less
than a dollar a day, and reversing the AIDS epidemic by the
year 2015. But
many others see it as far broader - a summit in search of a
global
blueprint for altering the sum total of human activity so that
it no longer
depletes the world's resources. "Sustainable development is
about human
activity and the Earth. It must include every aspect of life,"
said Carlos
Rivera, an activist participating in summit preparations as
a
representative of young people.
The environmentalists' criticisms surfaced at the close of the
third of
four two-week preparatory meetings leading up to Johannesburg.
One more
preparatory session opens in Bali, Indonesia, on May 27. While
preparations
have been conducted by low-level envoys to date, cabinet ministers
have
been invited to Bali. The action plan began as a 21-page document
drafted
by Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who
is chairing the
preparatory meetings. By Friday it had ballooned to more than
100 pages,
and delegates were far from agreement on a final version, Salim
said.
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