Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

The planned Earth Summit in Brazil next June faces disaster because
of growing antagonism between the rich and poor nations, warns Crispin Tickell,
former British ambassador to the UN. Tickell, one of the architects of the
summit, was opening a two-day conference in London last week to discuss
Britain’s contribution to the meeting to be held in Rio. The blame lies
mainly with the rich world, especially the US, he added.

‘The industrial nations are the principal cause of most env ironmental
problems today, producing 75 per cent of the carbon dioxide that is causing
the greenhouse effect, for instance,’ Tickell said. ‘But they have not shown
themselves able to come forward and admit it’s their problem . . . It has
been painful to attend, as I have, numerous meetings where the rich countries
think this is a Third World problem. It isn’t. It’s primarily a First World
±è°ù´Ç²ú±ô±ð³¾.’

The Earth Summit, also known as the UN Conference on Environment and
Development (UNCED), is an outcome of the UN’s Brundtland report, which
was published four years ago. This stressed that environmental protection
and economic development were inseparable issues because the natural wealth
of the environment was the key to all man-made wealth. But, said Tickell,
the First and Third World are polarising as if the Brundtland report had
never happened.

‘Everyone is a bit discouraged by UNCED so far,’ he said. ‘It is attracting
an enormous amount of cant. The biggest single problem today is the attitude
of the US.’

The nations of the Third World, who have clubbed together to form the
Group of 77, ‘see the summit as a chance to screw more money out of the
developed nations’, he said. ‘It’s very dangerous. The aid simply is not
going to happen.’ Aid was neither a good way of protecting the environment,
nor of conveying wealth to anyone in poor nations other than rich elites.

Maria Elena Hurtado, director of the World Development Movement in London,
argued that ‘environmental destruction in the Third World is caused by a
lack of development’ and warned that poor nations were asking: ‘Does planetary
salvation require keeping four billion people in the Third World poor?’

A review by the British government of recent negotiations for the summit
reported that ‘little progress was made in discussion on the Earth Charter’,
which is intended to be the centrepiece of the summit. The chairman of the
charter negotiators wanted to turn a 145-paragraph draft charter into ‘a
short inspirational document’. But Tickell warned that ‘to produce a high-flown
declaration that gives the illusion of something having been achieved would
be the worst result of all’.

The next, and last, preparatory meeting, in New York in March, has been
extended to five weeks in an effort to reach agreements on topics which
have been neglected. These include the oceans, land resources and desertification,
which have so far ‘scarcely been discussed’ according to British negotiators.
But, as the British government’s review noted, many observers ‘fear that
environment and development have moved apart politically and conceptually,
demonstrating that the message of sustainable development is becoming lost’.