Global Policy Forum

By Laurie Goering

The expansion of free trade, often promoted as a way to solve the world's social, economic and environmental problems, has widened the gap between rich and poor nations and failed to slow ecological degradation, South African President Thabo Mbeki charged yesterday as he opened the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

"We do not accept that human society should be constructed on the basis of a savage principle of the survival of the fittest," said Mbeki, who will serve as chairman at the 10-day United Nations conference.

The summit, called to find ways to implement the environmental and social promises made at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, appears instead to be shaping up as a showdown between developing nations that have benefited relatively little from globalization and richer countries hesitant to reach into their own pockets to help the poor catch up.

While conceding that virtually all the world's nations have dragged their feet on implementing the promises made at the Rio Earth Summit, Mbeki and others made clear yesterday that they believe wealthy nations, which use most of the world's resources, produce most of its pollution and have been the main beneficiaries of globalization, should be doing more to help solve the world's social or environmental ills. "A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by islands of wealth surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable," Mbeki said.

He noted that "human society possesses the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment," but doing so will require wealthier nations to recognize their "differentiated responsibility."

Mbeki's remarks come as the United States has backed away from international engagement, except in its war on terror. President George W. Bush, who has expressed strong suspicion of international bodies and agreements, will not join the more than 100 world leaders expected to attend the Johannesburg summit. The U.S. delegation, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has made clear it will fight efforts to set new targets for reducing poverty and plans no new funding for anti-poverty and global environmental efforts.

The 100-member Canadian delegation will be led by Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who will attend the final three days of the conference.

U.S. reluctance is easy to see in the draft implementation plan for sustainable development being discussed here. Large sections of the document that include criticism of globalization have been challenged and dropped. So have resolutions on reducing reliance on fossil fuels, bringing the Kyoto protocol on global warming into effect and giving poorer nations special access to global markets. Similarly, efforts have been made to soften or eliminate proposals to reduce poverty by half and improve access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015.

Poorer nations, in turn, have pushed to include language insisting on a "right to development," criticizing "unsustainable consumption and production" in the developed world and calling for richer nations to recognize their "differentiated" responsibility in paying to ease the world's ills.

Finding common ground between the two views will be difficult but vital to making progress here, analysts said.

With extreme-weather events such as floods in Europe and Asia and drought in southern Africa believed linked to climate change, "we cannot afford to leave this great summit with the feeling that our differences did not allow us to confront this great challenge of our times," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.

About 40,000 government officials, non-profit delegates and businessmen are expected at this week's summit, as negotiators try to build an action plan to address problems from disappearing forests to the HIV-AIDs epidemic sweeping southern Africa.

While social and environmental ills are the summit's main focus, trade disputes also promise to take centre stage. Developing nations will press hard for wealthy countries to cut the $350 billion U.S. a year they spend subsidizing their farmers, claiming that the payments make it impossible for poorer nations, many of which base their economies on agriculture, to compete in world markets. Spending on foreign- development aid by richer countries is by comparison only a little more than $50 billion U.S. a year, officials said.

Wealthy nations will try to turn the summit spotlight on good governance issues, pointing out the irony of committing development funds when nations such as Zimbabwe, under President Robert Mugabe, are edging toward economic collapse because political survival has taken precedence over economics and good sense.

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