Economist: Johannesburg 2

The Economist

September 7, 2002 U.S. Edition

SECTION: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

HEADLINE: The bubble-and-squeak summit

DATELINE: johannesburg

SOME Britons are fond of a dish made by mashing and heating the remnants of previous meals. The mysterious repast known as bubble-and-squeak is not haute cuisine, but it is good in parts. Much the same might be said of the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development that closed this week. Almost everything on the menu at Johannesburg had been served up before, at one conference or another.

Thus, development targets were rehashed from a turn-of-the-millennium meeting in New York. "New" aid packages from rich countries proved to be warmed-up pledges first made at a finance-for-development bash held in Monterrey, Mexico, this year. On the side, talks on market access and farm subsidies reconfirmed promises on freeing trade that were made at talks in Doha, Qatar, last year. The main green "successes" were unilateral declarations of support for a protocol on greenhouse gases that was drawn up in Kyoto in 1997.

The UN man in charge of the summit, Nitin Desai, says all this was to the good. The official meeting of 21,000 delegates was not supposed to raise big new issues, but rather to consider well-known problems and find practical ways to solve them. Delegates, presidents and spin-doctors queued up to say the meeting was about "actions not words", "starting a new era of implementation" and "creating partnerships". The Rio environment summit ten years ago produced a well-received final declaration, but little of substance followed. Clare Short, Britain's development minister, says the reverse is true, on both counts, of this year's talks. Squeak less, bubble more

Although Ms Short and other government delegates were unimpressed by the final Johannesburg text and its separate political declaration, they point to a few specific commitments and a useful emphasis on fighting poverty rather than on conservation. Most striking was a promise to cut by half the number of people with inadequate water and sanitation, and to try to do so by 2015. The evidence from unglamorous sewerage and hygiene projects is that helping an extra billion people in this way will do much to reduce diarrhoea, cholera and other water-borne diseases that strike the poor disproportionately.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is charged with monitoring progress towards this target and towards other, restated, Millennium Development Goals--to halve the number of people living in absolute poverty, to cut illiteracy and to cut child mortality, also by 2015. It will do so mostly by collecting new and reliable statistics and by presenting annual country-by-country reviews. With proper figures and accepted priorities for aid spending, governments should be better able to fight poverty. Money would help too: America, Britain and France each said that aid would be channelled towards poor-country sanitation projects.

Although Africa is likely to benefit from anti-poverty measures, some of its leaders did little to help themselves during the ten days of talks. The leaders of Zimbabwe and Namibia took turns haranguing western leaders, especially Britain's Tony Blair, for meddling in the continent, even though southern Africa, much of which is in the grip of famine, depends on foreign help to feed around 14m people. Levy Mwanawasa, Zambia's president, said again that his government would refuse "poison" as food aid, and will therefore turn away genetically modified (GM) grain, despite reassurances from Europe, America and the World Food Programme that there are no health risks involved. Yet the WFP has enough GM grain stocks to feed for two months the 21/2m Zambians who are suffering from famine. Its non-GM stocks will last only two more weeks, and will be hard to replenish.

On environmental matters, the summiteers agreed to do more to conserve and restore fish stocks, in part by promising to guard ocean areas already designated as protected--with 2015 chosen, once again, as the date for achieving success. Leaders from China and Estonia used their five minutes in the plenary session to announce ratification of the Kyoto protocol. This sets out rules for how much rich countries should cut emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that are thought to add to global warming. The prime ministers of both Russia and Canada promised to ratify soon. When they have done so, the protocol will have enough support to come into force, despite America's refusal to agree to it.

So much for the specifics. Much of the rest was mushy and imprecise. After resistance from oil-producing countries led by Venezuela, from America, and from poor countries worried by costs, the final text includes no targets for the use of renewable energy sources such as wind, sunlight and waves. The Americans opposed "unrealistic" targets for these technologies in particular, and any outside meddling in domestic energy policies in general.

Environmental activists and some American renewable-energy companies were predictably disappointed. But enthusiasts said they were happy that, for the first time, such a UN conference had declared an "urgent need" to "increase the share of renewables" in global energy production. European Union countries and Brazil had wanted targets, and may well announce them unilaterally. South Africa said it would reveal its target for renewable-energy production within a few weeks. Seven of the world's largest energy companies also announced that they would share technical plans on how to get more solar-powered generation plants to rural areas in poor countries.

Such private efforts were reckoned by the summit's cheerleaders to be its main success--although many activists were furious about "corporate takeover" of the meeting, calling it a victory for greed and a tragedy for the poor and for the environment. Business was barely present in Rio ten years ago, but some 700 companies and 50 chief executives attended the Johannesburg talks.

This week Mr Desai happily rattled off lists of 230 "type 2" initiatives agreed between governments, companies and non-governmental groups (type 1 initiatives are those between governments alone). Some will no doubt prove to be public-relations stunts, but the successful ones are meant to import private money and expertise into development projects. HSBC, a big bank, plans to spend $50m over the next five years on lending 2,000 of its staff to work on projects run by environmental groups such as Earthwatch. Alcan, a Canadian aluminium company, says it will help villagers in Bangladesh to remove arsenic from their water supplies.

Mark Malloch Brown, the UNDP's boss, also wants more official aid used to "leverage" private cash into poor economies. He thinks it might be used to cut the cost of hooking villages up to local electricity-generating plants, or to subsidise the prices charged. But some firms are already taking it upon themselves to do things previously left to governments. Shell, a large oil company, plans to put solar panels in thousands of rural homes in poor countries. Various mining companies that operate in southern Africa, including Debswana, De Beers and Anglo American, have promised free anti-AIDS drugs and health care for infected workers and their families.

These public-private partnerships may have more impact than all the fine words spewed at the Rio talks. But many delegates in Johannesburg say that this should be the last great UN gabfest on sustainable development. "The time for these general summits is gone, we don't need another meeting like this in 2012, this is enough" said Anders Rasmussen, Denmark's prime minister and the EU's current president. Smaller, focused meetings should be expected instead of jamborees that take too much effort and usually produce slight results. And yet, as eaters of bubble-and-squeak sometimes find, another plateful is often just too tempting.

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