The Hindu : Johannesburg fiasco

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Monday, Sep 09, 2002

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Johannesburg fiasco

THE WORLD SUMMIT on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg could not have ended in a bigger failure. It did produce a plan of action on sustainable development, but it was a plan that either watered down existing national and global commitments or passed off old agreements as new ones. It did produce a political declaration, but the rambling document will not serve as a charter for Governments and societies. Billed by the United Nations bureaucracy as the "Last chance to save the planet'', the only meaningful message from the Johannesburg jamboree is that the expensive talk shops that the U.N. environment and development summits have become no longer serve any useful purpose.

The biggest problem of the WSSD was that the U.N. process attempted to make the meeting much larger than a review of the landmark 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro. As a result, a disorderly agenda that covered every imaginable economic and environment issue was foisted on the WSSD. The result was only to be expected — a rambling agreement with non-binding, weak and regurgitated promises to promote sustainable development. An accord in the Johannesburg plan of action to halve by 2015 the two billion people without access to sanitation and drinking water has been touted as one of the biggest achievements of the WSSD. This was achieved after much hair-splitting between the U.S. and the rest of the world over the language in the agreement. But this very commitment is already one of the U.N. goals. It was one of the Millennium Development Goals drawn up at another U.N. conference, the Millennium Summit of 2000, and was yet passed off at Johannesburg as a new commitment. Another achievement that has been touted is the commitment at the WSSD to "significantly cut'' the rate of species extinction by 2010. But signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity had agreed at a meeting last April to go even further — to take measures by 2010 to "stop" species loss. If the plan of action did not contain recycled or weakened commitments, it included either voluntary accords (such as the establishment of a new solidarity fund to aid poverty reduction) or promises without time-tables (such as promotion of renewable energy). It is no wonder that the first reactions to the Johannesburg agreements have been of deep disappointment. A number of national and global civil society organisations have described the pacts as a watered-down version of the Agenda 21 agreement drawn up at the 1992 Earth Summit and Johannesburg as a step back, not an advance from Rio de Janeiro. An important reason for the Johannesburg fiasco is that the global willingness to collectively deal with the problems of the environment gradually evaporated during the past decade of accelerated globalisation. This was exemplified by the absence from the WSSD of the heads of Government of two countries whose policies matter for global environment protection and development — India and the U.S. The U.N. process did, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, bring to attention a number of major environmental issues and facilitated global agreements on ozone-depleting substances, climate change and biological diversity. But Johannesburg demonstrated that the process has now exhausted itself of intellectual and political persuasion. It will not be easy though to overhaul the system because an entire global industry comprising U.N. and Government bureaucrats, the media, aid groups and civil society organisations has evolved around the summit process and has a self-interest in preserving this system.

The Government of India's attendance at the WSSD was notable only for its very weak presence which was quite the opposite of earlier U.N. meets on environment. It was not just the absence of the Prime Minister that made India's participation in the summit a non-event. India did not provide any important inputs into the summit process. The Indian representatives made their ritualistic speeches about consumption patterns in the rich countries and about the responsibility of the developed countries to clean up the environment. But for a world tired of U.N. summits on the environment, these were especially tired sounding words that no one wished to hear.

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