| WSSD-FRANCE:
Making a Global Push for Privatisation
By
Julio Godoy
PARIS, Aug 22 (IPS) - France will push
for privatisation in international partnerships at the World
Summit on Sustainable Development that begins in Johannesburg
Monday.
The government will support international
partnerships in water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity,
a government spokesperson says. The French government has
specifically called for ”integrated management of water
resources to give the poorest people on Earth access to clean
water.”
When international financial organisations
such as the World Bank speak of integrated water management,
they mean privatisation. This is the policy the French government
is pushing, even in regions where people cannot pay high tariffs.
The government takes a similar position
on energy. ”In Johannesburg we will make three propositions
concerning the efficacy of electricity generation, its decentralisation
and international regional integration,” the spokesperson
says. Here again the government is talking privatisation.
The government is talking of similar
policies in agricultural research, management of water for
irrigation and development of organic farming.
President Jacques Chirac, who will be
going to Johannesburg, outlined four objectives of his government
at a meeting with ministers of his new government May 29:
”To reinforce the global system of protection of the
environment, to further improve international solidarity,
to concretise this solidarity in projects with private enterprises,
and to advance deliberations in favour of cultural diversity.”
In another statement distributed by a
spokesperson, Chirac said: ”At the World Summit in Johannesburg,
humankind meets its own destiny. It is the women and the men
of all nations and of all cultures coming together to master
the challenges of our time, to build together the universal
civilisation that globalisation demands.”
Chirac added: ”Confronted with
the ecological dangers threatening our planet, confronted
with the growing inequalities between rich and poor, humankind
needs a great leap, a great collective will. The globalisation
of economy demands the globalisation of solidarity.”
But his government failed to define tangible
ways in which these objectives could be reached. A spokesperson
said only that France will support European initiatives ”aimed
at enforcing the application of Agenda 21”, the declaration
adopted at the Rio summit in 1992.
Critics say French policy contradicts
the declarations of its leaders. ”The French right-wing
government is the last defender and the strongest lobbyist
in Europe of subsidies for intensive agriculture,” says
Noel Mamérre from the Green party. It is a policy ”that
poisons subterranean water sources, retards regeneration of
soil, and works against international development co-operation
and organic farming.”
Chirac makes ”grandiloquent non-binding
speeches at international forums to avoid being seen to be
on the side of the usual suspects,” says Pierre Tartakowsky,
deputy president of the French non-governmental organisation
Attac. But the so called ”integrated water management”
that France will support in Johannesburg ”means putting
a vital natural resource in the control of a handful of international
private corporations that have been involved in the past in
corruption on a large scale,” he says. Within France
that model has also led to unduly high water prices, he says.
Similar problems have been reported in
several African countries where the ”French model”
of water management has been applied since the nineties, Tartakowsky
says.
Bruno Rebelle, director of Greenpeace
in France says that at the preparatory meeting in Bali, developing
countries had asked the U.S. and the European Union (EU) to
drop subsidies for agriculture that prevent farmers from Africa,
Asia, and Latin America becoming competitive in the world
market.
The demand was ignored by the U.S.
and the EU, Rebelle says. Critics say the French leadership
is not tackling fundamental issues. (END/2002)
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