Earth Summit: a balance sheet

Opinion is divided on what the Earth Summit in Johannesburg achieved. Developed countries pushed their WTO agenda on issues such as labour standards and eco-labelling. Developing countries responded by pressing for removal of trade-distorting subsidies for agriculture in the North. The two sides fought to a standstill and the finally-agreed formulations are marginal departures from the trade agenda agreed in Doha, says C. Dasgupta. WAS the Johannesburg Earth Summit an historic milestone or was it a forgettable non-event? The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, has offered a sensible assessment. "We all know that summits like these deliver very little," he observed, "but let us not pretend that they deliver nothing." In essence, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg repackaged major components of two earlier accords ? the poverty eradication goals of the UN Millennium Declaration adopted in 2000, and the ODA target reaffirmed in the Monterrey summit in March this year. Thus, the Implementation Plan agreed in Johannesburg specially focusses on action in five key areas previously identified in the Millennium Declaration ? water, energy, health, agriculture and bio-diversity. It calls for halving by 2015 the proportion of people living below the $1-per-day-poverty-line, of those who have no access to safe drinking water and of those lacking basic sanitation. It calls for joint actions to improve access to energy services in order to facilitate achievement of the poverty reduction target. It also notes that new and additional financial resources will require to be provided to developing countries so as to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity. Much of this is only a reiteration of the goals of the Millennium Declaration. The sanitation target is new and its adoption was initially contested by the US on the ostensible ground that concrete actions were required, as opposed to adoption of new targets. On energy and biodiversity there is some new language but no real new commitment. An attempt by the EU to introduce a target for renewable energy failed to find support. The most bitterly contested sections of the Implementation Plan concerned links between the environment and development on the one hand and trade on the other. Developed countries sought to use the forum for pushing their WTO agenda on issues such as labour standards and eco-labelling. Developing countries responded in the same manner by pressing for removal of trade-distorting subsidies for agriculture in the North. In the event, the two sides fought to a standstill and the finally agreed formulations showed only marginal departures from the trade agenda previously agreed in Doha. The Implementation Plan that finally emerged from Johannesburg sets out a list of sensible, if unoriginal, priorities. The package lays a welcome emphasis on poverty eradication. The critical weakness of the plan lies in its failure to identify costs and sources of financing. What has emerged, therefore, is less an Implementation Plan than a wish-list. The Summit did, of course, reiterate the Monterrey appeal to "developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the internationally agreed levels of Official Development Assistance". But this weak appeal stops short of urging these countries to attain the internationally agreed ODA level of 0.7 per cent of their GDPs, or even to make "concrete efforts" to do so. It appeals to them only to make "efforts" "towards" the target! The realty is that, in 2000, ODA contributions of the developed countries amounted to a mere 0.22 per cent of their total GDP. Only four ? ? Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands ? achieved the agreed target. Moreover, the Monterrey accord covered ODA flows, not the "new and additional" resources for the environment, over and above ODA commitments, promised at Rio in 1992. The fact is that funding for international cooperation has been drying up even as environmental issues are at the top of the global agenda. This drying up of overseas aid flows has had a disastrous impact on some of the Least Developed Countries. However, for countries like India, which are not significantly reliant on aid flows, the major cause of concern is the failure of the industrialised countries to live up to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" agreed at Rio. The principle requires them to take steps to halt and reverse the global environmental degradation for which they are largely ? and, in some cases almost exclusively ? responsible. A glaring example of this failure is the refusal of the USand Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and dilution of its provisions to accommodate other industrialised countries. The Johannesburg summit paid obeisance to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" but did not translate this into specific requirements for action. It also made a passing bow in the direction of "sustainable patterns of consumption and production," without probing further into the question of altering life-styles. Paradoxically, the Johannesburg Summit will be remembered for its innovative features, despite the fact that its programmatic content is largely a recycling of previous agreements. A major innovation was the participation of CEOs and other non-governmental personalities in the summit Round Tables. This followed the precedent set at Monterrey and it could well become a standard feature of future summits, blurring the distinction between state and non-state actors in selected fields. (This pattern will not be replicated in fora where decision-making procedures are weighted in favour of powerful states: it can be confidently predicted, for instance, that Security Council debates will not be enlivened by the participation of Greenpeace or CND representatives.) One of the documents produced at Johannesburg to the accompaniment of much fanfare is a list of so-called "Type-II" initiatives ? voluntary cooperation agreements in which at least one of the partners is a non- official organisation. These innovations have a superficial appeal and their actual contribution to promoting sustainable development is likely to be marginal. There is also a point of principle involved in inviting representatives of non-state entities to directly participate in summit Round Tables. The UN is an organisation composed of sovereign states and this feature of its personality should not be lightly diluted.