From Rio to Johannesburg: what happened?

From Rio to Johannesburg: what happened?

by TEWOLDE BERHAN GEBRE EGZIABHER

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from the 26 August to the 4 September, 2002. Much was expected to come out of this Summit. But the expectations were diverse, and often mutually contradictory.

The confusion over expectations is hardly surprising. WSSD was the ten-year follow-up to another Summit – the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) – which took place in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Rio Summit was fuelled by optimism generated from – amongst other things – the end of the cold war, and the desire for goodwill from the winning West to use what would have been spent on armaments to uplift humanity as a whole. The Summit focused on expressing faith in the future in the form of the Rio Principles, Agenda 21 as a global action plan, and some international agreements to protect the environment, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Basel Convention to control the movement of hazardous substances, and the Vienna Convention on the ozone layer.

The Rio Summit was characterised by big ideas and good intentions. The Johannesburg Summit of 2002 was supposed to be more about action. It was formally a continuation of the Rio process, and was meant to review and add impetus to implementation. But it was clear to those who gave it any thought that it would focus on much more, and deliver much less, than the Rio Summit.

This is because over the last ten years the Rio process had been banging heads with an opposing force. By Johannesburg, the other post cold war trend that gave rise to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Marakesh in 1994 had become an overwhelming reality which the Summit could not ignore. The Marakesh process saw the end of the cold war as an opportunity for consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few that could wrest them away. In the North, this meant transnational corporations not only amassing more wealth, but also usurping the control of government from the population. This was done by taking away decision-making power on trade and finance, defining its norms, and giving it all to the WTO to implement with virtually no reference to the wishes of the people of the country in question. This move has effectively made citizens and their governments helpless when it comes to acting on national issues. In the South, this meant the amplification of the South-North resource flow already established by the colonial norms that determined most international law and created the current international institutions, including the United Nations. We should remember that the UN was established when the countries of the South were colonies of the North.

According to the WTO Agreements, control is taken away from the state through the provisions on National Treatment and Most- Favoured-Nation Treatment. This makes trade free of human influence. Far from freeing the South, “free trade” frees its resources to flow more forcefully North. Argentina is the most recent and most dramatic example of what this kind of freedom means to the peoples of the South. Unlike the requirements of Agenda 21 and the Rio Agreements, which envisage the Southward flow of resources to bring about universal development and environmental well-being, “free trade” according to the WTO Agreements exacerbates Southern poverty and Northern wealth, leading to global instability.

The Doha Ministerial Conference of the WTO in 2001 had called for a harmonisation of the two most extreme agreements in this context. These were Rio's Biodiversity Convention, which has the potential to empower the rural poor, the indigenous and local communities, by recognising their own biodiversity and knowledge and technologies on it, and the WTO's Agreement on Traderelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which provides the legal framework for transnational corporations to privatise the resources of the rural poor. Ten years after Rio and eight years after Marakesh, states had begun to feel the‘push-me-pull-you' effect of these two trends. So Johannesburg could not avoid the challenge of trying to harmonise the rules governing wealth and poverty, free trade and sovereignty, insensitive trade and vulnerable environment, war and peace, terrorism and submissiveness.

This was an impossible aim, requiring much more negotiation than was possible in Johannesburg. So it was inevitable that everybody feels short-changed by the Summit (except the officials who have to paint it as a success). It failed for the Rio-hopefuls and the Marakesh-expectants. As expected, those with money and power were better organised and more influential, and the Johannesburg Summit still produced an outcome tilting towards Marakesh and supporting trade more than the environment, justice and equity. But the Marakesh lobby failed in its main objective: achieving harmonisation by subordinating environmental (and other) treaties and agreements to the WTO, thus giving trade rules precedence over all others. Thanks to the tenacious fight by Norway, Switzerland, Saint Lucia, Vanuatu, Hungary and Ethiopia, this proposal was defeated at the last moment. It was my fortune to have been involved in this. After I spoke, the G-77 and China withdrew their support for the proposal. Others followed, and the US was left isolated and dumbfounded. In spite of this success, a work programme established by the Doha Declaration will continue to work towards bringing about this harmonisation. The fact that trade and power are always correlated does not augur well for environment, justice and equity. Could the UN system, perhaps under the United Nations Environment Programme, initiate a parallel process to ensure that trade does not eclipse all?

A very important development resulting from the interaction between the Rio and Marakesh processes is a call for developing and implementing international agreements to ensure corporate responsibility and accountability. This was pushed by the G-77 and China and opposed by the US in Johannesburg. The US was arguing particularly strongly for future agreements to be exempt from such conditions. This seems to have been aimed at freeing corporations from responsibilities under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the Kyoto Protocol and other agreements to come.

Johannesburg has forced a redefinition of responsibilities for those of us working on biodiversity in the international fora. We have to:

• Ensure that the WTO's work programme does not undermine any environmental agreements, all of which impinge on biodiversity,

• Continue aggressive awareness raising and lobbying for the substantial change of TRIPS, so that it stops being used to pirate the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity of indigenous and local communities,

• Monitor closely the activities of the life science corporations,

• Propose and debate draft international agreements on the responsibility and accountability of life science corporations,

• Continue with awareness raising and lobbying for better implementation of the CBD, especially regarding:

o Food sovereignty and agrobiodiversity,

o Community and farmers' rights,

o Benefit sharing,

o Support for conservation.

In conclusion, the Johannesburg Summit has downgraded some of what we believed humanity had achieved in Rio. On the other hand, so has it downgraded what the rich and powerful had believed they had achieved. It has juxtaposed us, hopefully for meaningful compromises, but at least for a fight. As we are both on the same Earth, we must either accommodate each other or fight, and most probably do both. Johannesburg has opened new avenues for action and is ushering in a busy life for each one of us.

Reference for this article: Tewolde Egziabher, 2002, Editorial: From Rio to Johannesburg: what happened?, Seedling, October 2002, GRAIN Publications

Website link: www.grain.org/seedling/seed-02-10-1-en.cfm

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