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Earth Summit begins

Johannesburg, Aug. 26. Billed as the biggest conference on environment, the UN Summit on Sustainable Development opened here today with thousands of delegates from 30 nations, including India, converging here to discuss ways of judicious use of natural resources to save planet earth and alleviate poverty.

Opening the 10-day conference, seen as a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, South African President Thabo Mbeki made a fervent appeal for co-ordinated international effort to translate rhetoric into action for tackling poverty while sustaining environment.

A high-level Indian delegation led by Union Minister for Environment and Forests T R Baalu is attending the conference that is expected to accept an action plan of non-binding recommendations that would shape the world's environment agenda for the next decade.

"Poverty, underdevelopment, inequality within and among countries, together with the worsening global ecological crisis, sum up the dark shadow under which most of the world lives," warned Mbeki, who is chairing the summit.

"For the first time in human history, human society possesses the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty and under development.

"To use these possibilities successfully requires that we also agree to the concept of a common but differentiated responsibility."

But Mbeki said it was vital for leaders to come up with something practical, rather than rhetorical. The summit's action plan had to be "credible and meaningful", he said.

- PTI

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