ENVIRONMENT
At Rio conference:
The real debates are not on the
THE ENVIRONMENT agenda
THE HUGE QUANTITY of people, paper and rhetoric at the United Nations Conference on the
Environment and Development (UNCED) which opens in Rio de Janeiro at the start of June will have no relation to quality. It can be safely predicted that the concrete results will be derisory.
HERMANN DWORCZAK — May 22, 1992.
Parade of the vanities
Rio is a " Parade of the Vanities", as
D ELEGATIONS are expected in Rio from 160 states. They will include heads of state and government, parliamentarians, experts and representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The lowest estimate for the number of participants is 25,000.
This army will not in fact have a lot of real work to do. The innumerable preparatory conferences - the most recent the conference on the climate in New York - have shown that little is likely to be achieved even at the level of resolution passing. Immediately before the opening of the congress, the following documents were on the table:
Agenda 21: This paper of some hundreds of pages is meant to show the ecological road forward into the 21st century. Even the conservative Austrian paper Die Presse concluded soberly that "this paper can be accepted even by states which are far from serious about the environment. It has no legal weight"
For the implementation of the most important points of the Agenda, UNCED General Secretary Maurice Strong has estimated that some $650bn would be needed - of which the lion's share, some $500bn, would have to be provided by the developing countries themselves. The Rio Declaration: Originally the adoption of an "Earth Charter" was envisaged. In the event we get 27 principles which are wholly lacking in the necessary vision. Connoisseurs of the scene have picked up the remark by US president George Bush that "the American Way of Life is not up for debate in Rio"; the American leader can come to the summit without fear of that. The Climate Convention: This text is hardly worth the paper it is printed on. Binding standards for the reduction of the emission of gases responsible for the Greenhouse Effect have been cut out. In particular, the USA has expressed its total opposition to any clear statement of obligatory measures. The Forest and Species Defence Convention: The convention on forests had already fallen by the wayside during the preparatory negotiations. It is possible that some kind of face-saving forest "paper" will be adopted by the conference. On the species convention, although it is estimated that some million types of plants and animals will have died out before the year 2000, there is no sign of serious action being taken. The main reason is the policies of the rich industrialized countries which want to keep the Third World as a region to be exploited as freely as possible.
The rich North, where 20% of the world's population consumes 80% of resources, is interested in keeping the discussion in Rio within strict limits. The international economic conditions which condemn three quarters of the world's population to social marginalization are not to be mentioned here, being considered the responsibility of other bodies such as the General Treaty on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Nor is there to be any discussion of the relevance of the debt burden on the Third World to environmental issues.
a representative of an Austrian NGO, Brigid Weinzinger, who works for the Austrian Information Service on Development Policy, put it. In her view, "In Rio they are only going to look at the symptoms. The South will not obtain its right to sustainable development. The North meanwhile wants only to discuss those environmental questions that affect it directly.
"On the other hand, last year's international conference of NGOs in Paris maintained unambiguously that a programme that did not include drastic reductions in military spending, reductions in carbon dioxide emissions above all by the industrialized nations and a solution of the debt crisis in favour of the Third World countries was not serious."
It is not only the political axis between the capitalist states of the North and their neo-colonial agents in the South which makes it impossible for the Rio Summit to pay any attention to those who Frantz Fanon called the Damned of the Earth. The very theoretical basis of the resolutions and specific proposals is anything but encouraging. The Brundtland Report from the UNCED entitled "Our Common Future» does not question the profit motive. In place of the previous "unrestrained" growth there is to be "balanced" growth.
Export-led development
Various growth models are proposed for the Third World in which exports, carried out with no change to the existing one-sided structure, and coopera- 3 tion with the multinationals are to pay
ENVIRONMENT / USA a central role: "Multinational business can play a key role in ensuring lasting development, especially since the developing countries are gradually coming to rely more and more on foreign capital".
The extreme moderation of the Brundtland Report goes so far as to rule out any mention of the suppression of nuclear power or a ban on the industrial exploitation of the Antarctic.