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Despite all the talk, real change is as elusive as ever
21 December 2002
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Fred Pearce

Enlarge Poorer countries falling behind

Enlarge Hotting up

This was the year the world embraced sustainable development - with the result that there was even less certainty about what it meant.

In its name, the World Summit held in Joburg in August endorsed everything from saving the orang-utan to building an Africa-wide electricity grid.

Small was beautiful, but then so was big. Everybody agreed on the need to remove the yoke of poverty from the world's two billion poorest citizens. But how to do this remained unclear. Progress? Well, perhaps.

The year began with free marketeers proclaiming that sustainable development is about making money - no more and no less. The creation of wealth would pay for the alleviation of poverty and repair of the environment. And the best way to generate wealth was more trade.

But not everyone agreed. In May, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that we had a choice: get rich by putting markets first or sustainable development first. Only the latter would endure, giving us a cleaner, healthier, more peaceful and egalitarian world. The former would not, because a bad environment is an economic millstone as well as a recipe for social instability and - whisper it - terrorism.

At meetings in Mexico in March and at the G8 in June, President Bush and other Western leaders agreed that trade alone was not enough. They promised more foreign aid for Africa - but with the proviso that African governments opened their own markets to other countries.

Perhaps they felt guilty about their failure to lift domestic trade barriers as they had promised at a trade meeting in Qatar the previous year. For the year also saw Bush raise subsidies for US farmers, while Europe again fluffed efforts to reform its Common Agricultural Policy. Rich nations still spend five times as much supporting their farmers as they do on aid to poor nations. In fact, every cow in Europe is subsidised by $2.20 a day - more than the income of almost two billion of the world's citizens.

Adding fuel to the fire, the UN reported in June that living standards in the world's 49 poorest nations were lower than 30 years ago. Globalisation was stripping them of natural resources without relieving poverty one jot, the report found. And more of the same would impoverish them further. The report coincided with the World Food Summit in Rome, which heard that 840 million people worldwide go to bed hungry. Outside China, the number has risen by 50 million in six years.

Two months later, rich nations turned up at the World Summit in Joburg protesting their sorrow at this situation, but assuring the poor that the cure was more of the same. The delegates promised to halve the number of people without clean drinking water and sanitation by 2015. But would the promises prove any more real than those to halve poverty and hunger? (And hadn't the World Water Decade once promised clean water for all by the end of the 1980s?) Fearing that global summits were losing their credibility, the UN declared there would be no more. "Delivery" was the order of the day.

But perhaps there is now more realism on all sides. Take the greens. Once, they barely engaged with the politics of trade and economic development. That made them easy to support and easy to ignore, which is what happened after the Earth Summit a decade ago.

During 2002, by contrast, Friends of the Earth spent more time talking about "corporate accountability" than about saving the rainforests. And campaigners against genetically modified crops spent less time whipping up fears about "Frankenstein foods" and more time warning that biotech is allowing agribusiness to "lock up" the food chain with patents on genes and procedures.

Big business also talked of sustainability at Joburg. Hundreds of corporations signed up at the World Summit to green-tinged "partnership" projects with local communities and environment groups. Many such projects were probably little more than PR stunts, of course. But at least they have given greens a new weapon: demanding that corporations meet their promises. That could, just conceivably, make the World Summit more significant than many now suppose.

Meanwhile, UNEP's vision of environmental decay undermining future prosperity loomed large. Emissions from bush fires and vehicle exhausts are creating a permanent "brown haze" above Asia that cuts India's crop yields by 10 per cent, one study claimed. And Indonesia's rainforests, on which millions depend, will be logged out within a decade.

Climate change continued - the year is set to be the second warmest on record. Yet in June, Australia joined the US in pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, despite a nationwide drought that many in the country blame on global warming.

The world is now waiting for Russia's ratification before the protocol can come into force. But scientists are increasingly fearful that the treaty could be sunk by efforts to keep the Russian President sweet by allowing him and others to claim that forestry schemes are soaking up improbable amounts of carbon. Even if the protocol survives, its impact will be minuscule.

Any good news? Yes: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species added sharks and mahogany trees to its list of protected species. And peace treaties were signed in three of Africa's largest and poorest countries, Angola, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet even before the ink was dry, famine had returned to stalk the continent. UN agencies said 25 million people were at risk.

The outlook isn't good. There's plenty of food available on the world markets, but the poor have less cash than ever to buy it with. And everyone still has an incentive to plunder the planet. There's still nothing to stop big companies annexing natural resources such as cocoa and cobalt at rock-bottom prices, and then moving on when the bounty runs out. As rich nations battling to hold back would-be migrants discovered during 2002, the poor may decide they have little choice but to join them.

From issue 2374 of New Scientist magazine, 21 December 2002, page 18

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