A Sign of Things to Come? Slo-Mo Talks Precede Summit

By Thalif Deen

Two days of pre-summit negotiations this past weekend have yielded little headway on the final draft plan of action.

Despite optimism expressed by the 15-member European Union and the South African host some of the key issues in the areas of financing, globalisation, and market access, remain unresolved.

At a press conference Sunday, South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said: “We are making good progress,” but added that “we didn’t expect to finish in two days”. “Let’s see what happens tomorrow when we get down to serious negotiations,” she added.

She said South Africa expects the summit to be “a successful summit” – as do hundreds of delegates from the UN’s 189 member states who arrived in Johannesburg beginning Friday.

One Third World diplomat, representing the 133-member Group of 77, was more pessimistic: “We are keeping our fingers crossed hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.”

“This is not a meeting to discuss philosophical concepts. We are here to get commitments – and certainly in writing,” he added.

The worst of the summit may come in the inflexible positions taken by some members of the Western group of nations, he said, who have “refused to yield an inch” since the last Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting in Bali in June.

Daniel Mittler of Friends of the Earth International told Terra Viva he does not expect any concrete action or even time-bound targets.

“The United States, Canada and Australia form an axis of environmental evil in these negotiations,” he said, making a mock allusion to the US President George W. Bush’s characterisation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the world’s political “axis of evil”.

“Their objectives are clearly to keep the lobbyists of big business happy, especially of industries that are clearly not sustainable—like oil, mining and coal.”

In the case of the United States, Mittler said, “this is not surprising given the fact that it was exactly those companies that financed President’s Bush’s election campaign.”

One of the primary demands of the Group of 77 developing nations is time-bound targets which are being strongly resisted by the United States.

Under-Secretary-General Nitin Desai, Secretary-General of the Summit, told reporters Sunday that “targets are on the (summit’s) agenda … No one has argued that there should be no targets.”

But Michael Dorsey of the Sierra Club insists that the US administration “is actively seeking to water down the text (of the draft plan of action) and undermine the negotiations in cooperation with the UN Secretariat”.

“The US is the primary obstacle to concrete action and time-bound targets,” he told Terra Viva.

At the last PrepCom meeting in Bali, he said, one of the US’ lead negotiators dismissed time-bound targets as “fiction” and “meaningless theatre”.

Zuma was emphatic that targets will prove useful only when they are implemented.

Danish Secretary of State Carsten Staur, speaking on behalf of the EU Presidency, said: “The Union believes that a way of showing real commitment is to set quantifiable targets, implementation time-tables and monitoring mechanisms.”

Although more than 100 world leaders are expected to address the summit, one of the notable absentees is President Bush.

Last month, 31 rightwing, conservative, American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) urged Bush to skip the summit pointing out that the meeting would be an exercise in futility. They also warned the US delegation not to back an EU proposal for the creation of a proposed World Environment Organisation (WEO).

Asked about Bush’s absence from the summit, the South African foreign minister said that political will, one of the key elements for the success of the summit, “is not expressed by just one person”. “We have a critical mass of leaders” attending the summit, she said.

And the summit will be just as successful, she added, without Bush.