How could he link up with other small-town mayors in the developing world who want to improve their long-term planning, the visitor wanted to know. To Gutierrez, the mere fact that the man was there asking the question represents big progress. So did the reality that the mayor can find his peer group–mainly on the Web. “Now we’re talking about concrete actions involving partners that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” says Gutierrez, a specialist on Latin America. “The evolution has been fantastic.”
Of course, not everyone is coming away so well pleased with the summit, billed as the largest such gathering ever. As the 10-day meeting neared a conclusion Tuesday, a host of environmentalist and anti-globalization groups attacked the results as barely progress, at best. Members of a coalition known as People’s Earth Decade planned to show up dressed in mourning black for the Wednesday finale; one environmentalist group denounced the event as the “World Summit of Shameful Deals”.
But others, even among the disappointed, were more philosophical. No one had expected it to be easy to move beyond the broad goals for development and environmental protection articulated at Rio, even just to set targets. The heady days following the end of the Cold War, when delegates thought history was over and a unified planet would pull together on common problems, are long gone. “Rio was the Earth Summit–this is the Down to Earth Summit,” says S. Jacob Scherr of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “Rio was about principles–Johannesburg is about getting things done.”
But conflicts of the day diverted attention from what was to have been a focus on laying out specific targets for safeguarding the planet. The presence of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres drew protests from pro-Palestinian activists, with South African police using a water cannon to disperse about 100 demonstrators trying to stop his address to the summit today. On Monday, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe stole the show with a blast at British Prime Minister Tony Blair. No matter that Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned commercial farms during a prolonged drought threatens widespread hunger–his denunciation of white colonialism brought down a house that included about 100 heads of state. “Economically, we are an occupied country, 22 years after our independence,” he said. “Accordingly, my government has decided to do the only right and just thing by taking back land and giving it to its rightful, indigenous, black owners.” And Tariq Aziz, deputy prime minister of Iraq, issued a long blast at threats of an attack by the United States (whose president was absent). By meeting privately with the two during the session, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan placed himself in the middle of both crises.
In his absence, President George W. Bush came in for a beating. A particular sore point for environmentalists was U.S. opposition to setting out a target schedule for the reduction in reliance on fossil fuels. Along with Saudi Arabia, Japan, Canada and Australia, Washington “managed to protect their fossil fuel interests at the expense of the two billion people on the planet with no access to energy services” charged the Worldwide Fund for Nature. On Tuesday night, negotiators were battling to resolve an impasse over a paragraph in the meeting’s “plan of action” involving so-called reproductive rights. Canadian delegates threatened a walkout unless a phrase calling for respect for “human rights” in this area was reinserted; Washington, the Vatican and some others feared that might be construed to include abortion rights. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s eleventh-hour appearance Wednesday held little promise for neutralizing the anti-American vitriol, almost no matter what “deliverables” he carried in his pocket to announce.
The tally of achievements could cheer only an optimist. Negotiators agreed on specific targets on sanitation, biodiversity loss, management of chemicals and the restoration of fish stocks. For the first time, the United Nations acknowledged that governments alone can’t take on development. The meeting called on the U.N. General Assembly to establish a World Solidarity Fund to help raise private funds to eradicate poverty. The group adopted the goal of halving the number of people-1.2 billion–who live on less than $1 a day. But minimizing these achievements misses the point, organizers of the summit maintain. “This is tremendously helpful for a process that is permanent,” says Gutierrez. “Meetings such as this bring issues to the top of the agenda for a short time. People are leaving here energized in terms of new partnerships.”
Still, the session invited a painful question. Has the world really advanced in the 10 years since the Rio summit, for all the lofty talk? Britain’s Blair struck an upbeat note, citing “Millions more people educated, millions more with safe drinking water, millions lifted out of poverty. Rio didn’t deliver everything, nor will Johannesburg,” he said. “No summit can. But this summit can and will make our world change for the better.” Others begged to differ. “It is obvious that the hopes generated by Rio have not been realized,” said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. “Nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, where all the economic and social indices present a pictured far more gloomy today than in 1992.” Johannesburg 2002 can hardly worsen worldwide poverty and disease, but it’s an open question how much good it can do.
