Mbeki urges action from Earth Summit delegates

South African President Thabo Mbeki has welcomed delegates to the World Summit on Sustainable Development with a call to action to band together to save the global environment and combat poverty.

“Out of Johannesburg and out of Africa must emerge something that takes the world forward,” Mr Mbeki said during a festive opening ceremony last night.

“We have no choice but to unite in action to ensure the triumph of the vision of sustainable development,” he said. “Acting together, we will win.”

But some activists fear the world’s wealthiest nations could sabotage any meaningful attempt to build on agreements adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.

“It’s important for us that the vision that was captured at Rio is not eroded,” said Goh Chien Yen, an official with the Third World Network.

The 10-day summit, which officially starts today, hopes to halve the more than one billion people without access to clean water and the more than two billion without proper sanitation.

It aims to develop specific plans for expanding the poor’s access to electricity and health care, to reverse the degradation of agricultural land and to protect the global environment.

In a weekend of pre-summit talks, negotiators tried to resolve contentious issues about who will pay for development.

Developing nations want promises from the West to increase aid and give greater access to its markets, while the US and other Western nations are resisting any new aid targets in the summit’s final plan.

The head of the US delegation, Assistant Secretary of State John Turner, said he was “feeling positive” about recent progress. But he also played down the importance of the summit’s final documents, saying they were secondary to the “really historic opportunity” the summit offers to launch “results-oriented” projects.

Many environmental activists were disheartened that US President George W Bush was not among the more than 100 world leaders scheduled to attend. They also blamed the US for much of the difficulty in reaching agreement.

“(The United States) can be a catalyst for positive action or a constraint on international cooperation,” said Achim Steiner, director general of The World Conservation Union, or IUCN.

The European Union has also been criticised for refusing to drop subsidies that protect domestic industries, an issue that infuriates many developing nations struggling to get access to European markets.

Nitin Desai, secretary-general of the summit, said he was not worried there was not yet agreement on the implementation plan, despite months of negotiations.

“You have differences precisely because you are talking about very important things,” he said.

Many activists have lamented the “implementation gap” between the commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit and the governments’ inaction to achieve those environmental and development goals.

Thousands of activists planned demonstrations during the summit demanding concrete action. South African foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said yesterday that orderly, authorised protests would be welcomed, but illegal demonstrations would not be tolerated.

“The summit is not a summit for anarchy ... I hope nobody is coming here to test the law,” she said.