Big business gets into bed with Earth Summit

YOU’D be forgiven for thinking the vast campus where Government officials have gathered in Johannesburg is more a trade convention than a summit to save the world.

Silver BMWs are on display outside the Earth Summit convention centre, telling delegates about the company’s “responsible” energy polices.

Around town, big-screen TVs beam a continuous series of interviews delivering the message that business investment is helping to raise living standards while protecting the environment.

Corporate groups are also hosting their own press conferences, just a stone’s throw away from a media centre sponsored by computer firm Hewlett-Packard.

All these snapshots of the Earth Summit are examples of an increasing closeness between the UN and big business on display.

And chances are that when delegates head home next week, the relationship with big business in tackling environmental issues will be greater than ever.

Governments are due to announce a series of partnerships with businesses and communities in developing countries. Led by the US, they will promote partnerships worth millions of dollars as a means to help economic development and preserve the environment.

To its supporters it is a sign the UN is finally ready to accept that the best way to help the developing world in the long term is to make it a reliable place to earn a few bucks.

But to many environmental groups, it is a sign the UN has finally raised the white flag and abdicated its role as a global social watchdog in the face of pressure from big business.

But all sides realise something went seriously wrong over the last 10 years as the targets governments set for themselves at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 went unmet.

That meeting led to the Kyoto global warming treaty, where signatories agreed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But that treaty is effectively dead in the water as the biggest polluter of them all, the US, won’t sign it.

Something has to give. And organisers of this summit are determined not to see its aims torpedoed again.

The US is pushing the idea of public private partnerships as a practical step towards sustainable development.

They controversially propose redirecting funds from existing programmes and funds to new schemes meant to meet the summit’s goal of halving poverty by 2015.

The summit’s UN organisers welcome the schemes as potentially important innovations, but are cautious not to place too much emphasis on them just yet.

But environmentalists fear they will merely provide an excuse for governments to dodge such responsibilities as affordable drinking water or electricity.

“Multinationals are unfit to deliver water to the world,” said environmental group Friends of the Earth, in a statement.

And they have a point. Globalisation and the free markets stand accused of lining the pockets of the rich and failing to produce any trickle-down benefits for the poor.

It will some time before environmentalists and big business trust each other.