Posted on 7-6-2002
The
World According To USA
Hundreds of hours and millions of pounds all add up to one global
disaster
at Bali - Poverty. The US blocks clean water and electricity
for the most
deprived people on the planet, as talks collapse in Indonesia,
by Geoffrey
Lean.
John Prescott was urged yesterday to go round the world "in
80 days" to
save a summit on world poverty after vital talks collapsed.
The talks the
last formal preparatory negotiations before the summit which
meets in
Johannesburg at the end of August broke up in Bali, Indonesia,
with more
than 100 points still unresolved, largely due to American obduracy.
The Bush administration rejected any new targets for reducing
poverty and,
in effect, refused to negotiate, stating its position and challenging
the
rest of the world to take it or leave it. It blocked plans to
halve the
number of the world's people without any sanitation a situation
that
causes a child to die every 10 seconds from water-borne disease
and to
double those who have electricity and other modern forms of
energy. The
negotiations at Bali were made more difficult because of weak
leadership of
the developing countries at the talks that allowed Opec, which
opposed any
resolutions on energy, to set the tone. Europe was also ineffectually
led
by Spain, the current holder of the EU presidency.
The collapse throws the summit officially named the World
Summit On
Sustainable Development into jeopardy, amid fears that heads
of
government will now stay away from it to avoid being associated
with a
failure. But Tony Blair, the first prime minister to announce
his
attendance, is committed to going, and Britain has led the international
drive to get the summit to produce results. The Johannesburg
meeting was
intended as the most significant world summit on the environment
and the
problems of the developing world since the Earth Summit held
in Rio de
Janeiro 10 years ago. The Johannesburg summit will review progress
since
Rio while turning the spotlight on problems in the developing
world and in
particular the eradication of poverty. But the American intransigence
throws its future into doubt. Derek Osborn, the head of Britain's
main
co-ordinating group for the summit the Stakeholder Forum For
Our Common
Future called on Mr Prescott to travel the world to save it
from
disaster. The Deputy Prime Minister, who successfully brokered
the Kyoto
protocol on global warming, has visited 30 prime ministers and
almost 100
environment ministers over the past two years, as Mr Blair's
representative, to try to prepare the way for a successful summit.
But he
has been scarred recently by inaccurate press reports accusing
him of
wanting to go to Bali for a "junket''. Mr Osborn said: "There
is an awful
lot to be done in a very short time. There are just 80 days
until the
summit opens and someone is going to have to go round the world
a couple of
times in those 80 days to pull it off. We really need John Prescott.''
There are two remaining opportunities at the end of this month
to rescue
the conference from disaster. A meeting of a few heads of government
in Rio
arranged by the Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso
and the G8
summit which will see leaders of rich countries meeting their
counterparts
from several African states. Experts say, however, that there
will have to
be a sustained effort to mobilise key leaders around the world
if the
summit is to succeed. Failure could put back by decades the
hopes of
reducing world poverty.
Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment,
tried to put
a positive gloss on the Bali summit, saying "a huge amount"
had been
achieved. "We have had a lot of movement and achieved quite
a lot of work,"
she said. "There was a bit of disappointment because we didn't
achieve
quite as much as we could have done, given the goodwill that
exists, but we
ran out of time. These are complex negotiations that involve
so many
countries across the world, so it is difficult." Mrs Beckett
had been
criticised for the £180,000 cost to the taxpayer of sending
a British
delegation to Bali.
Friends of the Earth International criticised the outcome of
the Indonesian
talks as a "foul result" that had produced too many voluntary
agreements
that benefited the US and the World Trade Organisation.
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