Despite talking about addressing poverty and natural resource degradation in developing countries for the last 10 years, the world has not succeeded in addressing either issue. This is because while industrialised countries have been busy promoting their own economic development, developing countries have lacked the imagination to come up with effective ideas to address these problems.

Members of civil society, including non-government groups (NGOs), academicians, government officials and scientists from five states called on the Indian government to form a concrete plan to address these problems for presentation at WSSD, to be held later this year. These groups were part of a meeting organised by the Indian Network on Ethics and Climate Change (INECC) and the Orissa Development Action Forum (ODAF), in collaboration with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi.

The meeting was convened to discuss regional priorities from the Eastern states for WSSD. Among the key issues identified were forest and biodiversity management, mining and displacement, coastal management, and urban environmental issues such as air and water pollution, health and sanitation.

Global preparations for WSSD are already underway. A UN meeting is scheduled later this month in New York City, where governments will debate on draft documents that will form the basis of various agreements in Johannesburg later this year. Regional level consultations have already taken place (see Background Note). However, at a meeting of South Asian NGOs organised by CSE in New Delhi in November 2001, participants decried the lack of input from civil society in the process.

Participants at the New Delhi meeting also agreed that Southern governments need to be proactive rather than reactive. Instead of merely responding to proposals from the North, the South needs to actively and creatively think of new ways of dealing with the problems they face, particularly the issue of poverty eradication through ecological regeneration.

• In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The event saw the emergence of several differences in the approach to environment and development problems in developing and industrialised countries. While industrialised countries focused on mostly environmental issues alone, developing countries were more interested in protecting the right to development of their citizens, and were afraid that the environment would be used as an excuse to thrust trade conditionalities on them.

For instance, in the run-up to UNCED, the US had suggested a convention to protect the world’s biological diversity, most of which is found in the developing world. What the US and other industrialised countries wanted was a convention under which developing countries would take a conservationist approach, like the industrialised countries, and set aside large tracts of land for preserving flora and fauna. Developing country representatives pointed out the flaw in this argument – that not only were natural resources a means of generating livelihood in developing countries, but also that several pharmaceutical and agricultural companies based in industrialised countries depended on this biological diversity, and exploited it with impunity, without sharing profits with local communities.

In this particular case, developing countries triumphed and the final Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recognised the rights of local communities on their biodiversity, and the knowledge associated with it. The US was so against this turn of events, which affected the profits of their large pharmaceutical companies, that it has not to this day, ratified CBD.

On the whole, however, the relationship between developing and industrilaised countries was an unequal one at UNCED, and has been so ever since. Industrialised countries, particularly the US, have been unwilling to recognise their greater role in damaging the Earth’s environment.

• UNCED resulted in the adoption of Agenda 21 -– a legally non-binding blueprint for government’s to promote ‘sustainable development’. The Rio summit also resulted in two legally binding conventions – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD).

In 1997, a five-year review of UNCED was held. Participants agreed that UNCED had by and large failed to deliver. In particular,

a. Carbon dioxide emissions had climbed to a new high since 1992
b. Large areas of old-growth forest were degraded or cleared
c. Poverty continued to be an enormous challenge, and
d. Agenda 21 largely unfunded.

World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD)

• Since last year, sub-regional and regional meetings have been held in most regions around the world, to decide the agenda for WSSD.
• The South Asia sub-regional meeting in Colombo, held in late 2001, was disappointing. It was clear that governments still control the agenda, and limit civil society participation. At the regional Asia Pacific meeting held in Cambodia in November 2001, governments themselves had very little idea of what they wanted out of WSSD, and how they would achieve it.
• Four ‘preparatory committee’ (PrepCom) meetings will be held before WSSD, to prepare the groundwork. Two PrepComs have already taken place. The third will take place in New York this month, from March 25 – April 5, 2002 (to find out what happens at this meeting, either write to anju@cseindia.org, or visit: http://www.iisd.ca).
• At the first PrepCom in New York (April 30 – May 2, 2001), mostly organizational matters were discussed. At the second prepcom, also in New York (January 28 – February 8, 2002), a ‘Chairman’s Paper’ listed key issues that will be discussed. These included

a. Poverty eradication
b. Changing unsustainable patterns of consumption
c. Sustainable development and health
d. Protecting and managing resource base of social and economic development
c. Sustainable development and globalisation
d. Means of implementation
e. Sustainable development and small island developing states
f. Sustainable development and initiatives for Africa
g. Strengthening governance for sustainable development at national, regional and international level

Of these nine points that emerged from the Chairman’s paper (which is the document that will be transmitted to the third session for further discussion), very few actually present any significant or new ideas.

• The fourth meeting, to be held in Bali from May 27 to June 7, 2002, will be the most important, as governments are expected to discuss the elements of a concise political document for WSSD.