Columnists
Getting the price right
> BY JACK FREEMAN
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved

Some people have referred to the Johannesburg conference as "Earth Summit II," coming as it does 10 years after the first Earth Summit (officially named the UN Conference on Environment and Development) was held in Rio de Janeiro. Salim and its other organizers, however, tend to downplay any connection between the two events.

And with very good reason. At Rio 10 years ago there was also a great deal of talk about "getting the price right." There were optimistic predictions that an emerging science dubbed "green accounting" would soon provide us with a clear understanding of precisely how much environmental degradation was costing us. This, in turn, would enable us to put the "polluter pays principle" into effect and herald a whole new era of environmental protection.

Unfortunately, those predictions, like so many other things that were promised at Rio, have proved to be so much hot air. "Green accounting" turned out to be far more complicated than anyone had anticipated. It became evident that subsidies and other government policies were a large part of the sustainability problem face up to their own responsibility for it.

And, although the donor countries promised at Rio to increase their official development assistance "reaffirming" the UN's long-standing target for such aid of 0.7 percent of the donor country's GDP the poor countries went into a steep decline right after the summit and has been shrinking steadily ever since.

Five years ago, when the UN General Assembly held a special session to review the first five years of implementation of the Rio Earth Summit, the air was blue with recriminations. The poor countries angrily charged that they had been betrayed. The rich countries, in turn, charged that development efforts had failed because of the failings of the poor countries themselves. It seemed as if the only thing that everyone could agree on was this: The great global environmental problems that had inspired the Earth Summit in the first place were continuing to worsen.

And yet, despite the disappointments and the recriminations, genuine progress was also being made. Thanks largely to the efforts of the late Mahbub ul Haq, the guiding spirit behind the UNDP's Human Development Report, people were beginning to think of development as measurable not only in terms of macroeconomic factors but also human well-being. Under the leadership of Secretary General Kofi A. Annan, countries rich and poor signed on, at the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000, to the goal of reducing by half the numbers of people living in poverty by the year 2015.

To meet that goal and the other goals adopted by the Millennium Summit, however, would not be easy. UN officials estimated that development assistance, now totaling some $50 billion a year, would have to be doubled to $100 billion. To help make that happen, they convened another global summit, held in March in Monterrey, Mexico, to deal with Financing for Development. At that meeting, both the European Union and the United States pledged to raise the levels of their development assistance a small fraction of the needed $50 billion, and even that is to be phased in over a period of several years.

And yet, the Monterrey Summit also served to weaken the linkage between development and environment that had been forged in Rio. Environmental issues were pushed to the background as President George W. Bush and other leaders of the rich countries focused instead on the need for the poor countries to take responsibility for good governance. Instead of tackling the embittered issue of global climate change, the speeches at Monterrey dealt instead with the need for the poor countries to provide a business climate hospitable to outside investment.

The rich countries take the lead in dealing with environmental threats. Although the United States is by far the world's largest source of climate-changing "greenhouse gases," the Bush administration refuses to accept the Kyoto Protocol, the international community's formula for reducing emissions of such gases. (And, even though former Vice President Al Gore was one of the architects of the Kyoto Agreement, the Clinton administration declined to submit it for ratification because the Senate was so strongly opposed to it.)

In addition to these problems, there are several other aspects of the Rio Earth Summit that, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, can be identified as the source of ongoing difficulties. One example: the summit's glorification of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of indigenous tribes. The summit's organizers put great emphasis on the mystical relationship between such tribal groups and the land on which they rely for sustenance. To many people, though, this seemed (and still seems) a highly inappropriate model for sustainability in poor countries whose most serious social and environmental problems are to be found in the overcrowded slums of fast growing mega-cities.

One of the more highly touted features of the Earth Summit was its expansion of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but that too has had negative as well as positive effects. Some say it has shifted emphasis away from the practical give-and-take of negotiated cooperation between nations and has, instead, led to documents bloated with the "must have" provisions demanded by countless pressure groups. Such documents, critics complain, are so unwieldy as to be almost useless. Which is not to say that those added provisions are without value. Indeed, in the long run, the Earth Summit may be remembered best for the success of the Women's Caucus in peppering the text of "Agenda 21" with innumerable references to gender equity and equality The "gender agenda" is now firmly rooted in the international community's consciousness. It is beyond discussion.

Unfortunately, though, we are still struggling with the need to "get the price right" when it comes to sustainable development reason for optimism that this year's crop of conferences will get the job done.