Summit Begins Badly For
`Axis Of Environmental Evil'
By KAREN MACGREGOR

JOHANNESBURG -- The biggest United Nations summit in a decade began
yesterday amid political acrimony and accusations that the United States,
Canada and Australia had formed "an axis of environmental
evil" that was ignoring a responsibility to the planet and neglecting the
most basic needs of the world's poor.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) opened in Johannesburg
with the developing world, supported by the European Union, telling the
United States and other wealthy nations that more foreign aid and
commitments to changing their consumption patterns must be central themes
of the 10-day conference. "We do not accept that human society should be
constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the
fittest," said South African President Thabo Mbeki, opening the summit with
a blistering attack on globalization. He rebuked the West for using the
summit to promote open markets and international trade while refusing to
make new commitments to fighting AIDS, ancient diseases like malaria and
environmental degradation that has damaged forests, farms and drinking
water in the developing world.

Jan Pronk, the UN Secretary General's chief adviser for the summit, also
criticized the United States for focusing on terrorism while billions of
people live in poverty. "Post-Sept. 11 last year, we have seen security
being the overwhelming preoccupation of a country which is already safe,"
he said.

Friends of the Earth International said Canada had joined an American-led
effort to block a proposed agenda being promoted by a coalition of poor
nations and the European Union. The agenda includes tough new goals and
deadlines to achieve a drastic reduction in global poverty as well as a
cleaner environment by 2015. In a statement, the Dutch-based environmental
group accused the United States, Australia and Canada, as well as oil-rich
nations, "of standing in the way of international agreements for people and
the planet and called on other governments to ignore this 'axis of
environmental evil.'"

The United States has come to the conference, dubbed by many as the Earth
Summit, with its own plan to reduce poverty and improve the environment
through international trade and private-sector initiatives. It has said it
does not want to commit itself to any new international goals at the
conference. "Instead of using the Earth Summit to respond to global
concerns over deregulation and liberalization, governments are pushing the
World Trade Organization's agenda and rebranding it as sustainable
development," said Daniel Mittler, summit co-ordinator for Friends of the
Earth.

The Canadian delegation shot back at the environmental group, saying it had
its facts wrong and that Canada was trying to find a middle ground to which
both the United States and developing nations could agree. Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien is due to arrive at the summit on Saturday, when senior
officials will hand over the agenda to most of the world's top government
leaders. U.S. President George W. Bush has said he will not attend but is
expected to send his Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

Mr. Pronk, a former Dutch development minister, accused the United States
of sidelining global concerns to make way for its own priorities. "We have
stoked up fears about aliens, strangers and 'illegals,' " he said. "We can
go for an exclusive society, with the poor and underdeveloped always
excluded, or we can go for a world that is a safe place, where people have
safe homes and jobs." The summit is being held as a follow-up to the 1992
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and will consider plans to deal with
everything from safe water for the world's poor to new initiatives to
combat HIV/AIDS. As many as 40,000 people are expected to attend the summit
and its parallel conferences. Mr. Pronk said there had been slow progress
on the environment over the past decade but "a stalemate" on ways to
address poverty, in large part because the West had focused too much on its
own concerns. "We must stop this trend in inward-looking values, because if
we fail to include everyone we will breed resentment, which may also breed
violence," he said.

The United States sparked controversy at the summit yesterday, when the
head of its delegation said targets for poverty reduction were "no more
than lofty aspirations." Both Australia and Japan are widely believed to
support the U.S. effort to resist any expansion of global development goals
agreed to by the UN in 2000, that include halving world poverty by 2015.
The Canadian delegation has said it hopes to find other areas for
agreement. "We have positions that we are pursuing in areas such as
chemicals, sanitation, water and Africa, almost too many to handle," said
Dick Ballhorn, head of Canada's delegation and a deputy director at Foreign
Affairs. "We are playing a mediating role, bringing people together and
trying to negotiate agreement on issues that are blocking progress."

The EU delegation to the summit declared that more targets with binding
timetables would be needed to ensure that promises made in Johannesburg are
met. "Targets with timetables are at the core of our agenda because they
alone will make the international community accountable for delivering on
its promises," said Catherine Day, the European Commission director-general
for the environment. Broad consensus has been reached on three time-bound
targets covering the protection of fish stocks, education strategies in
Africa and gender inequalities, but the EU said these were "relatively
uncontentious and their importance should not be overemphasized."