| As
the leaders of the world's nations gather in Johannesburg
for the World Summit on Sustainable Development,
the ghost of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
looms over them like the proverbial "elephant
in the room." There are even some people who
have been referring to this conference as "Earth
Summit II." This makes sense in that it comes
almost exactly 10 years since the original "Earth
Summit" (officially the UN Conference on Environment
and Development, or UNCED) was held in Rio. On the
other hand, there are some very good reasons for
rejecting the "Earth Summit II" moniker,
which is precisely what UN officialdom has done.
For one thing, as any moviegoer can tell you, sequels
hardly ever measure up to their predecessors. For
another, the original Earth Summit is now remembered,
if it is remembered at all, as a major disappointment.
(Five years ago, when the UN General Assembly held
a special "Rio+5" session to review implementation
of the Earth Summit, hardly anybody had a good
word to say for it.)
Now,
with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, we can
see that Rio was not totally devoid of accomplishments.
It left us with a number of valuable agreements,
including a biodiversity treaty and a framework convention
for dealing with climate change (which, unfortunately,
Washington has been doing all it can to scuttle).
Where Rio failed most seriously was in the promotion
of its core concept: sustainable development, which
is to say the critical linkage of environmental protection
with the flow of aid from the world's richest countries
to the poorest.
At Rio (as at many other global conferences),
the rich countries reaffirmed the longstanding
UN policy setting 0.7 percent of each donor
country's total economy (GDP) as the target
for its development assistance, or foreign
aid. In the decade since Rio, however, the
flow of such aid has not risen but shrunk-and
significantly--with many people in the donor
countries arguing that such aid is at best
ineffective and at worst counterproductive.
Despite such contentions, however, as aid flows
diminished the problem of poverty in the poorest
nations grew more severe, and the gap between
the rich and poor nations widened dramatically-along
with a gulf of distrust between the countries
of the global North and the global South.
As much of
a blow to "sustainable development" as
that was, in the years since Rio its linkage
of aid with environmental issues has also gotten
lost, obscured by a welter of competing claims
promoted at subsequent UN conferences. Throughout
the 1990s, it seems, one "new paradigm
for development" after another came along
at regular intervals. One, dubbed "human
development," sought to link aid flows
to improvements in the health, education and
welfare of the masses. Other paradigms sought
to link aid with good governance, openness
to investment or acceptance of a market economy.
Other UN conferences
focused on the relationship between development
and: small island states
(Barbados), "social development" (Copenhagen),
population (Cairo), gender issues (Beijing)
and urbanization (Istanbul).
Sustainability (the environmental issues)
got pushed off to the margins. And then, of
course, there were all the people who argued
that the way to promote development, to ease
global poverty, was not with aid at all but
rather with trade.
The question
of trade has loomed ominously over the preparations
for the Johannesburg
summit even though a new round of global trade
talks-officially known as a "development
round"-was opened late last year in Doha,
Qatar.
Governments and activists alike are drawn
to the activities of the World Trade Organization
because, unlike the UN conference process,
the WTO has the means to make its decisions
stick. Member states can't just say one thing
and then do another; if they do, they face
the threat of serious (that is, costly) trade
sanctions or even possible expulsion from the
club. And, of course, almost everybody understands
that trade is (potentially, at least) beneficial
to all, while, as we've seen, there are many
who not only question the value of foreign
aid but see it as counterproductive.
It is not clear what, if anything, the Johannesburg
summit will do about the issue of trade, but
it is not one of the five themes laid down
by UN Secretary General Kofi A. Annan. Those
five are water, energy, agriculture, health
and biodiversity. Some people might argue that,
important as those issues are, they were all
covered at great length in Agenda 21, the voluminous
program of action for the 21st Century that
was approved in Rio. Unfortunately, under the
current rules, we are not supposed to be revisiting
that document or investigating why its proposals
have been so widely ignored.
When the Rio summit ended, there were many
who were quick to label it a failure, pointing
out its inability to reach agreement on how
its proposals were to be funded. UN officials
figured out that implementation of Agenda 21
would cost a total of $17 billion a year (above
the amount of existing international development
assistance), but the Earth Summit provided
no mechanism for ensuring that such funding
would be forthcoming. Indeed, it was not to
be-and that was hardly surprising.
Some other
people--perhaps more optimistic, or perhaps
just concerned about putting a good
face on it-argued that the Earth Summit at
least took a first step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, we have all been waiting 10
years for the second step. Looking back across
that decade, one could even make a case that
the Rio summit represented a kind of "last
hurrah" for the concept of international
development assistance as a force for global
good-that it has been going downhill ever since.
If the "political will" to expand
such assistance was hard to find among the
donor countries in 1992, it is even more scarce
today, even though the problem of global poverty
continues to worsen.
The reality is that UN conferences are nothing
if not political events. And this conference
faces an uphill struggle as it comes to terms
with the negative mindset of some its major
political players. That would be a huge enough
challenge for the organizers of this summit--even
without a dead elephant in the room.
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