Unfinished agenda

Between Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg, the world saw development taking a highly inequitable economic track and a backtracking by the developed nations on promises made.

THE United Nations, after spending $85 million on its big-ticket event the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), in Johannesburg, which had 70,000 participants from over 180 countries, has announced that there will be ``no more earth summits until governments put into practice what they have decided to do''. The event is seen widely as an opportunity lost for the leaders of the world to put on track social, economic and environmental concerns, the three pillars of development. Said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who led the Group of 77 (G-77) and China at the Summit: ``Repeating the format does not necessarily advance the cause. A lot of energy has been put into just stopping backsliding.''

Ten years earlier, world leaders left the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro with an ambitious agenda that is now mostly remembered as a string of broken promises and squandered opportunities.

The Rio Summit was a watershed in bringing environmental concerns to the mainstream. It catalysed new forms of international governance. Most prominently, a new body of international law was created by means of a set of conventions, among them the framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, followed by the Convention to Combat Desertification and treaties on managing migratory fish stocks, controlling trade in hazardous chemicals and phasing out persistent organic pollutants. Along with these, a range of structures and processes was created. The various conferences of parties, protocols, subsidiary bodies of scientific and technological advice, inter-governmental advisory panels and compliance mechanisms set up after Rio form an intricate machinery for multilateral decision-making on biosphere politics. Additionally, Agenda 21 led to the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development, which institutionalised the sustainable development debate between various sectors.

And if yet Rio failed, it was primarily because governments broke the promises they made. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: ``There are serious gaps in implementing Rio's clear agenda on sustainable development.'' And WSSD preparatory committee chairperson Dr. Emil Salim lamented: ``Development has taken only the economic track and left behind social and environmental sustainability.'' But even economic development, as he said, has been inequitable. The most important aspect of economic development has been the breaking down of national barriers; trade, financial and production activities have gone global and with it the power of multinational corporations and multilateral financial institutions has grown multi-fold.

This has had a tremendous impact on the poor. The rich-poor gap, across and within countries, has grown even wider. For instance, nearly 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day; another one billion cannot meet their basic consumption requirements. The share in global income of the world's richest fifth is 74 times that of the poorest fifth. The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years ending 2000 to $1 trillion. The poorest countries have seen their export earnings drop between 2.6 per cent and 5 per cent during each year of the Uruguay Trade Round. They will lose between $163 billion and $265 billion in export earnings while paying between $145 million and $292 million more to import food. Said the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme: ``The top fifth of the world's people in the richest countries enjoy 82 per cent of the expanding export trade and 68 per cent of the foreign direct investment, while the bottom fifth only gathers barely 1 per cent.''

The social effects of this kind of economic development have left 840 million people malnourished, while the consumption of the world's richest fifth is 16 times that of the poorest fifth. Over 160 million children are malnourished and over 250 million are working. More than 880 million people lack access to health services and 17 million die each year from curable infectious diseases. Of the 4.4 billion people in the developing countries, nearly 1.5 billion do not have access to clean water, 1 billion lack adequate housing and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. Nearly twobillion lack access to commercial energy.

In the environmental sphere, carbon emissions globally have increased by over 9 per cent since Rio; in the U.S. it increased by 18 per cent. Forested area has contracted at the rate of 2.2 per cent every year since 1992, and the decline in coral reefs rose from 10 per cent in 1992 to 27 per cent in 2000. By the end of the 1990s, 13 per cent of fish, 11 per cent of mammals, 10 per cent of amphibians and 4 per cent of birds were in danger of extinction, according to the World Conservation Union. Species loss, estimated to be over 100 times since the pre-industrial era, has led biologists to describe the contemporary period as an age of mass extinction, the first such in 65 million years.

During the same period there has been an unprecedented growth and penetration of multinational corporations; there are over 63,000 parent firms with 690,000 foreign affiliates covering the globe and in diverse economic activities. The world's top 200 corporations have a combined sales greater than the size of the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10. U.S. corporations dominate the top 200 corporations with 82 entities, followed by Japanese ones with 41. An incredible 97 per cent of all patents are registered to owners in developed countries. These multinational corporations have more economic clout than most developing countries. Their interest is represented by their governments in trade negotiations and in global financial institutions.

Not that Rio had only been about environment. It was about development as well — most crucial for the developing countries. And Rio saw promises being made of considerable resource transfers in support of Agenda 21. But this hope has been belied. The United Nations Commission on Environment and Development estimated that $600 billion would be required each year between 1993 and 2000 to implement Agenda 21 in the developing countries, of which $125 billion was to come through Overseas Development Assistance, or ODA (compared to the $350 billion the developed countries spend on farm subsidies). Although the rich countries committed 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product as ODA, it remained on paper. The ODA corpus fell from $69 billion in 1992 to $53 billion in 2000. The additional resources that were pledged did not materialise; not even technology was transferred.

One of the significant institutions that emerged out of Rio to support developing countries implement Agenda 21 was the Global Environment Facility. The governments of the developed countries pledged to support GEF but failed to do so. In 1994, the GEF received only $2.9 billion as initial support and thereafter, in 1998, $2.5 billion — substantially less than what they had promised. (While according to GEF secretary-general El-Ashry ``even $10 billion is not enough to clear all the projects in the pipeline'', the developed countries have promised $2.9 billion in additional resources.)

It is in this backdrop that the WSSD was convened, with eradicating poverty as the central theme. While everyone is agreed on this, the politics involved makes its implementation an uncertainty. For, addressing the issue of poverty would call for an enormous effort by the international community, and even how it should be done — primarily through ODA, grants or world market integration — remains an unresolved issue.