JOHANNESBURG — The UN summit conference on sustainable development opened Monday under what President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa called a "dark shadow" of poverty, underdevelopment and inequality along with a worsening global ecological crisis.
The theme of the 10-day conference, which will be attended by at least 104 heads of state or government but not by President George W. Bush, is how to ensure global development now without ruining the environment for future generations.
"A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable," said Mbeki in an address at the opening center of the conference.
The meeting here is a follow-up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago, and Mbeki said the world had made little progress in achieving the aims outlined there. "It is no secret that the global community has, as yet, not demonstrated the will to implement the decisions it has freely adopted," he said. "The tragic result of this is the avoidable increase in human misery and ecological degradation, including the growth of the gap between North and South.
"It is as though we are determined to regress to the most primitive condition of existence in the animal world, of the survival of the fittest. It is as though we have decided to spurn what the human intellect tells us, that the survival of the fittest only presages the destruction of all humanity."
The World Bank's vice president for sustainable development, Ian Johnson, said a $35 trillion global economy this year would grow four times in the next 50 years, and he added that it was the task of leaders and delegates here to determine "what should a $140 trillion economy look like."
Johnson said there could be no question of an acceptable future "unless we can make major inroads into crippling poverty."
"We believe poverty is at the heart of unsustainable development," he said.
Johnson said the $350 billion that taxpayers in the United States, the European Union and Japan pay every year to subsidize their agriculture contributes to the problem of world poverty, along with trade-distorting tariff measures.
For example, South Africa's cannery industry complains that no sooner has it built up a successful fruit-exporting business, than it faces punishing tariffs in the United States because of protests by U.S. pear growers. "This is exactly what we mean by distorting practices," said Richard Scobey, who oversees the World Bank's work on environment and social development in Africa.
Mbeki said the central task of the summit meeting was "to take stock of the inertia of the past decade and agree on very clear and practical measures that will help us to deal decisively with all the challenges that we face."
Nitin Desia, the summit meeting's secretary- general, stressed the need for action and implementation of existing agreements.
He said the summit meeting must achieve "a real plan of implementation, a credible and meaningful global plan of action for the realization of the goals that humanity has already set itself."
Many of the nongovernment organizations and citizens groups taking part in a parallel global forum to put pressure on the summit leaders expressed pessimism over the outcome, partly because the president of the United States, the source of a quarter of the earth's climate-changing pollution, is not attending to negotiate directly with other heads of state and government.
One of the most contentious issues here is that of trade and globalization, with a powerful corporate lobby pushing for more partnerships involving private enterprise in global development, and some of the nongovernment organizations accusing the United States and the European Union of pushing the interests of big businesses.
Ricardo Navarro, a spokesman from El Salvador of Friends of the Earth International, said, "If these corporations were as responsible as they pretend here in Johannesburg, they should all be signed up to a binding corporate accountability convention which would make them legally liable for irresponsible behavior."
The World Bank's Johnson said accountability would become an increasingly important issue, by which he meant more transparency to give citizens the information they need to hold governments and corporations to account.
Many corporations say they support social and environmental standards as well as financial results. But they are resisting any attempt to set up a formal accountability mechanisms.
In the absence of an agreed agenda, the delegates were concentrating on five priority issues proposed by Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations: water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity.
These issues will be debated by UN and other delegates during the first week of the summit meeting to prepare the ground for the arrival of heads of state and government later.
Officials stressed that all these items were interrelated. Health problems, for example, result from a billion people lacking clean water and two billion lacking safe sanitation.
Gourisankar Ghosh, executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, said, "This is a lack which affects almost every aspect and every moment of their lives - their health, their dignity, their environment, the well-being of their children and the development of their nations."
Police and security officials deployed thousands of officers around the conference site in the cosseted suburb of Sandton and the police warned that they would continue to crack down on unauthorized demonstrations.
Concerned about anti-globalization demonstrations that have disrupted other world meetings, edgy police officers fired three stun grenades to break up a peaceful but apparently unauthorized march in Johannesburg on Sunday. But the stepped-up security was unable to prevent an armed attack on a Swiss delegate at her hotel in South Africa's crime-ridden capital.
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