Will anything change as a result of the Earth Summit? Frank McDonald, in Johannesburg, assesses the prospects
South Africa's president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, summed it all up when he spoke to the press after the final plenary session of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg this week. "The critical issue is what happens after this," he said. And after 10 days of intensive horse-trading at the Sandton Convention Centre, that remains an open question.
For some, such as the World Development Movement, what went on there amounted to a "zero sum game" in which there were no real winners. For others, the outcome was little better than feeble, even gutless. Yet even after all the compromises had been made to keep everyone on board, delegates who didn't get a lot of what they wanted still hailed it as a success.
"Some people go from summit to summit, others from abyss to abyss," observed Mr Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. And if the world is facing the abyss, the US must be regarded as the principal culprit.
Instead of taking a progressive stance in advancing the sustainable development agenda, it dug in its heels at every turn on all of the crunch issues.
The fact that President Bush was too busy preparing for his assault on President Saddam Hussein to bother coming to Johannesburg was seen by many as a major snub to the rest of the world. That his Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, didn't turn up until the last day only compounded this US contempt, and it was little wonder that he was roasted when he finally came to the podium.
Few could credit Mr Powell's assertion that "President Bush and the American people have an enduring commitment to sustainable development," when the US had already reneged on the Kyoto Protocol - the only international instrument to deal with the adverse effects of climate change - and sought to have all references to it omitted from the Johannesburg Plan of Action.
Yet despite US recalcitrance on the world's most serious environmental threat, some of its closest allies at the summit - Canada, Australia and Japan - declared that they were moving towards ratifying Kyoto. The announcement by Russia that it, too, will sign up means that the protocol will now come into force early next year, to become the only concrete result from the Rio Summit in 1992.
What will Johannesburg produce? For a start, as President Mbeki noted, it has succeeded in projecting sustainable development on to the world stage. While Rio emphasised environmental protection, there is now a more balanced view that encompasses social and economic development and, in particular, the amelioration of grinding poverty in the poorest developing nations.
Thus, this summit can be seen as a significant contribution to "the evolution of global discussion", as Mr Mbeki put it. The UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, also saw the outcome in a positive light - he would, wouldn't he? - provided that the momentum was maintained to implement the targets and timetables agreed after so much haggling between the 187 participating countries.
Specific targets are few however. The most important is the commitment to extend basic sanitation at least to half the people without access to it by 2015. That means millions of taps and toilets, which should be good news for the plumbing industry - if there was any indication of where all the money was going to come from. Optimists say the funding required will be found from somewhere.
The US, whose $10 billion development aid budget represents just over 0.1 per cent of its GNP, opposed the sanitation target. Its delegation at the summit only went along with it in return for a major concession from the EU and "like-minded countries", notably Norway and Brazil, to drop a specific target for boosting the share of renewables in the global energy mix.
Not only that. The EU even had to concede to the inclusion of "clean" fossil fuel technologies in the final text on energy. This was a shameful climb-down, but one that had to be made - however reluctantly - in the interest of brokering a deal. As a result, greenhouse gas-belching coal, oil and gas-fired power stations can still be supplied to developing countries on "concessional terms".
But Europe, which has made more progress than anywhere else in promoting wind power - whatever about Ireland's dismal record so far - stole the moral high ground by declaring that it would go ahead anyway with firm targets for renewables. And its 15 member-states were joined in this upstaging of the US and OPEC by numerous others, including many of the countries lining up to join the EU.
GLOBALISATION, which wasn't even mentioned in any of the first Earth Summit's documents a decade ago, was another of the dominant issues in Johannesburg - specifically, corporate power and the World Trade Organisation's agenda. But environment and development lobbyists won at least a partial victory in persuading delegates to delete a clause that would have given WTO rules primacy over environmental protection.
Further discussions on this emotive issue are to take place at the next WTO ministerial meeting in Mexico next year. And even this week, the WTO's new director-general, Dr Supachai Panitchpakdi, was able to say with confidence that Johannesburg had kept its current Doha trade round on track - including the need to ensure that tariff barriers are not replaced by non-tariff barriers such as environmental "restrictions".
His predecessor, Mr Renato Ruggeiro, made no bones about the WTO's agenda . "We are writing a constitution for the world," he said quite openly on one occasion. Indeed, the extent to which it managed to get its trade agenda through the Johannesburg summit is reflected by the fact that there are around 200 references to the WTO or its rules in the final text, according to a word count by Friends of the Earth."Doha is what this summit was all about," according to Dennis Brutus (77), emeritus professor of African literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Once regarded by South Africa's apartheid regime as being among its 20 most dangerous opponents, he is now actively involved in the anti-globalisation movement; he was in Seattle in November 1999 when the WTO's ministerial meeting came under siege.
Later this month, after an extensive speaking tour in the US, Prof Brutus will be among those who will head for Washington DC to carry on the struggle at a three-day meeting of the World Bank. The next stage in the campaign will to develop an "alternative people's agenda" at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil, in February. Then it will be on to the WTO in Cancun, Mexico, the following November.
The WTO's Doha round of trade talks is already under way in Geneva, and it will be instructive to see how such issues as environmental protection, agricultural subsidies and corporate accountability will be dealt with there. Certainly, environment and development groups at the Johannesburg summit have no confidence that the WTO will embrace an agenda based on their interpretation of sustainable development.
Despite the fall-out from the Enron and Woldcom "accounting" scandals, the US entered a caveat to the text covering corporate accountability, by insisting that it was limited to existing rather than future agreements does not inspire much hope for new, binding international rules for big business..
"Voluntary partnerships" involving the corporate sector, governments and civil society are no substitute.
Friends of the Earth cite the Congo Basin Initiative as an example of what can go wrong. Though ostensibly intended to benefit forest protection in this ecologically important region, it has "put more money into flawed programmes that have not reduced illegal logging, empowered local communities or enabled sustainable forest management". The only real winners are the timber barons.
Irish NGOs at the Johannesburg summit complained that its Plan of Implementation "represents the lowest common denominator". It contained only limited references to human rights, made no serious commitments on aid or debt alleviation for developing countries, set no targets or timetables for renewable energy or debt and left reform of EU and US agricultural subsidies "entirely to the WTO".
The final paragraph of the 32-point political declaration adopted by world leaders before they flew home solemnly pledged - "from the African continent, the Cradle of Humankind", in Mr Mbeki's phrase - "to the peoples of the world, and the generations that will surely inherit this Earth, that we are determined to ensure that our collective hope for sustainable development is realised".
Two days earlier, in a fiery speech, President Jacques Chirac of France had posed this awkward question: "Can mankind, who is at the forefront of evolution, become the enemy of life itself?" Referring to the multitude of problems facing the world, he even suggested that "the house is burning" and reminded his colleagues, particularly those in the rich north, that none of them could say that they did not know.
Incidentally, the organisational cost of the summit was put $50 million - not counting all the air fares, hotel bills and lavish meals. Altogether, it was attended by 45,000 people and consumed enough energy to boil a billion kettles. And all the carbon dioxide - or hot air - it generated would have met the energy needs of half-a-million Africans for a full year.