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World leaders are jetting into Johannesburg Sunday for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (the Earth Summit), which the world expects will generate concrete actions to deal with the issues of global poverty and the prevention of environmental degradation in the decade ahead.
At its close tomorrow, the summit is expected to issue a declaration renewing political commitment to sustainable development and an implementation plan for meeting goals of preserving the environment and eliminating poverty.
However, the draft plan for implementation of these goals, which is described as the cornerstone of the summit, is still bogged down on several major issues, and analysts here doubt whether a breakthrough can be reached by the end of the summit.
Ever since the start of the summit on Monday last week, government negotiators have been involved in negotiations on the draft plan, a 71-page document containing recommendations on how to realize sustainable development.
Not one word in the draft document is legally binding, but it could have a resounding political impact because it will determine the environmental agenda for the next 10 years, and its text is likely to be the model for any legally binding treaties that emerge.
For that reason, the draft text has become a political war zone, with different groups, representing the interests of developed and developing countries, contending with one another.
Delegates said the main deadlocked issues include developed countries reducing or phasing out farm subsidies to ensure wider access for the Third World goods to rich markets, and the target to halve, by 2015, the number of people without access to decent sanitation.
Also on the agenda is official development aid from rich countries to the poor. The United States wants to attach wording that would link an increase in aid to efficient, non-corrupt governance, a demand rejected by developing countries as unacceptable interference.
United Nations officials say that 95 percent of the text of the draft plan has already been agreed upon, but they admit that the remaining issues are the most contentious and difficult ones to solve.
On Saturday, negotiators reached an agreement on the wording of the text to support the Kyoto climate change pact without embarrassing the United States, the major state balking against the treaty.
The agreed text reads: "States that have ratified strongly urge those that have not done so to ratify Kyoto in a timely manner."
However, the deep rift between the North and South is the issue of agricultural subsidies.
The United States and the European Union (EU) share common ground in the maintenance of huge subsidies for their farmers, which is blamed for destroying the livelihood of hundreds of millions of farmers in developing countries.
Neither wants to go beyond a vague promise made at the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Doha, Qatar, last year.
The Doha meeting called for substantial improvements in market access, reductions of all forms of subsidies, and substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support.
Developed countries, in particular the United States and those in the EU, have come under fire at the summit for the US$350 billion a year they pump into agricultural subsidies, which developing countries say makes it impossible for them to compete.
Delegates from developing countries also said that the subsidies also allow farmers in the North to dump cheap produce in the Southern hemisphere.
They pointed to the fact that agricultural products make up a large part of their export products, saying that if their products can not enter developed markets, their efforts to eradicate poverty and protect the environment will be greatly hampered because of shortage of funds.
They urged developed countries to take concrete steps in this regard so that they will have the means to implement whatever is agreed upon at the Earth Summit.
On Sunday, the EU sent a signal that the region was prepared to phase out its huge agricultural subsidies.
"Our long-term objective is clear: We will reform our agricultural policy, and we will bring down trade-distorting subsidies," said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Danish prime minister and EU president, at a business meeting on the sidelines of the summit.
He said that the shortest route to a cleaner and sustainable environment was to raise standards of living in the developing nations through development and economic growth.
"The rich countries should open their markets to the goods that many poor countries are best suited to produce, namely food and textiles," he said.
However, analysts said that promise is one thing, and action is another. It is even difficult for the EU to reach a consensus among its member countries on the issue, which is still hotly debated within the block.
(China Daily September 3, 2002)
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