Green groups critical of moves to fight poverty

THE United States and European nations began showcasing public-private partnerships to fight poverty at the Earth Summit yesterday amid growing criticism they will help businesses more than the poor.

Delegates at the 10-day summit resumed talks that had stretched late into the night to end a wrangle over poor nations' calls for rich states to phase out vast subsidies to farmers after making progress on other aid and trade.

The US was set to roll out several partnerships yesterday, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars in resources from existing programmes and funds to programmes meant to meet summit goals of halving poverty by 2015.

UN organisers say partnerships getting governments to work with local communities, non-governmental organisations and businesses in solving the planet's ills could be a big innovation by the Johannesburg summit.

But environmentalists are skeptical, saying they are likely to be poorly monitored and may be a way for states to shirk responsibility for services such as affordable drinking water.

Friends of the Earth said privatisation's of water supplies in nations such as Bolivia and the Philippines meant higher prices. Nearly one in five people, or 1.1 billion of the world's population, has no access to drinking water.

"They're supposed to be working up an action plan with targets and timetables and the means of implementation. We can talk about partnerships after they've done that," said Greenpeace climate policy director Steve Sawyer.

The US is taking the brunt of criticisms at the August 26-September 4 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and a group of US opposition congressmen stepped up the pressure, laying into the Bush administration.

"The US administration is becoming somewhat of an obstructionist in terms of meeting the goals of sustainable development," said California Democratic congressman George Miller.

President Bush will not be among more than 100 world leaders attending the summit's finale next week to launch ways of stopping the spread of AIDS and malaria, protecting fish stocks and promoting environmentally friendly agriculture.

Negotiators failed to unravel divergences over trade, aid and globalisation after making progress on many other details in a draft text on aid to the world's poor.

The US wants the final text to preach the benefits of globalisation, while groups from developing nations to the European Union want the text to show that not all have benefited.