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Earth Summit: Asia drowned out
again
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Another Earth Summit has ended with a whimper, and Asia
again ruing a lost opportunity to influence trade and
environment issues.
As in Rio de Janeiro a
decade earlier, developing Asia in particular lacked a
consensus voice or even a common forum in this week's
reprise in Johannesburg, which ended on Wednesday night.
Aside from an occasional outburst by the Group of 77,
the agenda of the World Summit for Sustainable
Development was shaped by Northern industrial economies,
with the more representative European nations playing
the foil to predictable US dominance.
Not for
the first time, Asian negotiators found themselves on
opposing sides. Japan surprisingly broke its US shackles
by giving guarded support to the Kyoto protocol on
emission controls, but was otherwise the cheerleader for
US positions on energy, poverty and biodiversity.
It might not have mattered if the issues were
not so critical to Asian interests. The underlying
premise of both summits was that the richer nations
should do more to help poorer Asian, African and South
American states close the wealth gap. But the evident
conclusion, after a week of meandering and largely
fruitless discussion on 150 wildly different issues, was
that the poor would have to wait a little longer. At
least until they could find some way of grasping the
initiative themselves.
They have already been
waiting 30 years, since the Conference on Human
Environment in Stockholm established the United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP) as an ambitious vehicle for
redistributing global resources. In typical plodding
bureaucratic fashion, it would be another decade before
the UNEP would hold its first high-level meeting and a
further 10 years before the UN could convene the Rio
Conference on Environment and Development - quickly
given the media sobriquet of Earth Summit.
In
between, the so-called Brundtland Commission on
Environment and Development issued a landmark document
with the hopeful title of "Our Common Future" that
proposed a blueprint for sustainable Third World
development. That none of its key recommendations has
been fully implemented says much for the breadth of the
North-South divide, with advanced nations unwilling to
risk politically sensitive concessions during a downward
economic cycle and the Third World lacking leverage to
force the issue.
Another reason is lack of
motivation: none of the various UN covenants on climate
change, biodiversity, pollution, poverty eradication and
trade is binding, even after ratification by the
respective governments.
Asia's big stake in the
summits has been the prospect of enhanced access to the
domestic markets of North America and Europe, and of a
reversal in the declining trend of direct international
development aid.
The former would be achieved
through reductions in US and European Union production
subsidies - especially for agriculture - that would
allow the Third World to meet the competitive threat of
trade globalization. But the tradeoff would be improved
corporate and public-sector governance, which would open
the door more widely to the same Western countries.
Washington also wanted bigger Third World commitments to
reduce greenhouse gases before it would endorse the
Kyoto protocol.
China, Russia and the Group of
77 delivered a stunning setback to the US, with the help
of Canada, by announcing their eleventh-hour acceptance
of the Kyoto document, and thus paving the way for its
formal adoption after three years of deadlock. But they
needed EU help to do it, and were under considerable
moral pressure to take the lead in reducing pollution.
Of the five biggest global producers of toxic carbon
emissions, four - China, Russia, Japan and India - are
either partly or wholly in Asia.
Kyoto was
achieved without any further Asian concessions on
governance or greenhouse gases. But it might well turn
out to be a hollow victory, as developing nations
allowed their mistrust of US intentions on globalization
to obscure some important potential gains.
While
the governance focus was on corruption, business
transparency and the rule of law, it also touched on the
issue of corporate behavior abroad, and making foreign
investors accountable for their actions. India has been
trying since 1984 to hold senior Union Carbide
executives responsible for the calamitous Bhopal toxic
chemicals leak, which killed more than 3,000 in its
immediate aftermath and thousands more in subsequent
years.
In the event, the covenant was watered
down to a mild exhortation for the private sector to
"behave responsibly", and did not carry any legal
backing that Bhopal might have been able to use, though
it will still be referred to the UN General Assembly for
further debate.
Similarly, Asia might have found
economic benefit from taking a more courageous stand on
pollution and biodiversity, given that this continent is
in the frontline of the battle to save the environment.
The UNEP warned last month that a
three-kilometer-thick cloud of pollution hanging over
South Asia, believed to consist of ash, acids, aerosols
and other particles, could radically alter rainfall
patterns and threaten the livelihoods of millions. It
may eventually link up with a smaller cloud drifting out
from China and some Asian republics in Russia that is
thought to mostly be caused by factory pollution and the
haze from millions of wood stoves.
In Southeast
Asia, seasonal smoke emissions from forest fires are
causing health problems for millions of people in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand and the
Philippines, and accelerating the loss of forests. About
20 percent of the world's rain forests are in Southeast
Asia, 35 percent of its mangrove forests and 30 percent
of its coral reefs. According to the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the annual
deforestation rate is 1.04 percent, compared with a
world average of 0.23 percent, though environmental
groups believe this is a gross understatement.
Johannesburg delegations were asked to reignite
two flagging accords from Rio - the Convention on
Biological Diversity and the Climate Change Convention -
under which rich countries would somehow compensate the
poor for being more careful with their natural
resources. Another Rio document, the Statement of
Principles on Forests, set down guidelines for the
conservation and exploitation of natural forests.
But none of these conventions took into account
the devastating impact of the 1997-98 East Asian
economic crisis, and the end of the decade-long growth
in more advanced countries, which forced a reality check
on budgets. Exports of timber and other natural
resources became a lifeline for beleaguered countries
such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which not only lost
their foreign capital inflows but also had to defend
governance and legal systems against charges of
mismanagement.
The EU and US found a political
justification for making development aid more
conditional upon improved trade and investment access,
and eventually cut their spending altogether as economic
growth slowed at home. Instead of honoring a 1992 pledge
to give 0.7 percent of their income in the form of Third
World aid, most advanced nations are now giving around
0.3 percent, and sometimes as little as 0.1 percent.
A related commitment in 2000 to halve the
proportion of the world's population who live on less
than US$1 a day by 2015 is also viewed as redundant: at
least a billion Asians are directly affected.
There was agreement in Johannesburg on the need
to reduce by half the 2.4 billion people living without
clean water and sanitation by 2015, but as always there
was a quid pro quo with Western countries. Washington
and Canberra only dropped their opposition in return for
major concessions on a separate set of targets for
achieving substantial progress in developing renewable
energy forms by 2015.
Instead of a framework for
phasing out fossil fuels and hydro-electric power,
delegates agreed on a sanitized wording that actually
expanded the list of permissible energy types to include
oil and gas, while also allowing the Third World to burn
more wood.
The US and EU also prevailed on the
subject of trade subsidies, which was arguably the issue
of most importance to Asia. Delegates reaffirmed their
opposition to supports that might distort export prices,
while carefully skirting any mention of the subsidies
that are most vital to US and European economic
interests.
It could have been so different if
Asian nations had been able to project a third tier of
pressure on the two Western blocs.
They had
ample time to shape the agenda, with a women's summit in
Beijing in 1995, the Kyoto gathering on climate change
in 1999, another women's meet in Beijing a year later
and the World Youth Forum in Dakar that same year. As a
prelude to Johannesburg, regional meetings were held in
South Asia, East Asia and North Asia. But instead of
formulating a unified stance, Asians presented four
different perspectives, though there was commonality on
the point of enhanced trade access.
ASEAN made a
submission to Johannesburg, but only in an unofficial
capacity. Likewise, the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) caucus stayed carefully on the
sidelines, perhaps in acknowledgement of its split
loyalties between the Northern and Southern members.
The Group of 77 has 19 continental Asian
members, a dozen more in the Middle East or central Asia
and nine more in the Pacific, but suffers from similar
regional biases. Currently under Venezuelan control, it
is preoccupied with Israeli military excesses, the
future Palestine state, US intentions regarding Iraq and
the prickly issue of women's rights in Muslim states.
Given the development gaps that are opening up
within Asia, most analysts agree that it is naive to
expect that one representative viewpoint will emerge on
the best course to sustainable development.
Nevertheless, there appears little justification
for the most populous region in the world being the most
impotent on the world stage, even if we exclude the far
smaller, but usually more vocal, African states.
As environmentalists noted in Johannesburg, the
pollution cloud that is spreading over the continent is
showing no political favors and makes no allowance for
wealth disparities. And nor, they say, should Asia's
leaders.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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