Here
in Rio, Presidents Cardoso and Mbeki
are expected to be joined by Prime Minister
Göran Persson of Sweden. It was
in the Swedish capital of Stockholm that
the
first global conference was held in 1972,
the UN Conference on the Human Environment.
One of the initiatives that came out
of that conference was the UN Environment
Programme, an agency that started out
vigorously
under the leadership of Maurice F. Strong,
a Canadian businessman and environmentalist.
UNEP, however, has become a moribund
body because of poor performance by Strong's
successors, according to knowledgeable
observers.
Strong himself is in Rio, not the least
because he was Secretary General of both
the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the 1992
Rio Summit. His deputy at the time of the
Earth Summit, Nitin Desai, is also here.
Desai is Secretary General of the Johannesburg
Summit which, like the Rio Summit, is expected
to attract tens of thousands of participants.
The Rio meeting, which formally starts
on Sunday, is called the International
Seminar on Sustainable Development. Seminars
will be held on the expectations and opportunities
presented by the Johannesburg Summit. This
meeting will also be a critical gauge of
perceptions of the Johannesburg Summit.
It is widely thought that preparations
for Johannesburg have faltered and that
the summit's agenda has yet to be fully
clarified. There is also rising concern
that the rich donor countries who are expected
to commit additional monies for poverty
alleviation, may demur on account of global
economic malaise. The world's 30 wealthiest
countries currently give some $50 billion
in grants to the 137 so-called developing
countries, a figure that is widely considered
inadequate. There is growing sentiment
in the wealthy industrialized countries
that much of the trillion dollars of development
assistance since World War II has been
wasted through mismanagement and corruption.
Today, more than half of the world's p[opulation
of 6 billion lives in abject poverty.
Sunday's opening ceremony as well as the
three-day international seminar will take
place in the Modern Art Museum (Museu de
Arte Moderna) here.
