Summit to Save the Earth Rich Vs. Poor

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

THE LINEUP OF WORLD LEADERS WILL include Prime Minister John Major, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa and, now that he has finally made up his mind to go, President George Bush. The Dalai Lama will join a delegation of clerics, artists and green-minded parliamentarians. Hundreds of native leaders, from American Indians to Malaysian tribesmen, will represent the interests of the world's indigenous peoples. Tens of thousands of diplomats, scientists, ecologists, theorists, feminists, journalists, tourists and assorted hangers-on are expected to gather in dozens of auditoriums and outdoor sites for nearly 400 official and unofficial events, among them an environmental technology fair, a scientific symposium and a meeting of mayors. Peter Max's art will appear on special postage stamps. A Robert Rauschenberg poster will be slapped up on walls. Placido Domingo will headline a star-studded musical tribute to the planet. And a full-size replica of a 9th century Viking ship will sail in from Norway carrying messages of goodwill from children all over the world.

If size and ambition were the measures of success, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro would take all the prizes. The so-called Earth Summit, more than two years in the making, will be the largest and most complex conference ever held -- bigger than the momentous meetings at Versailles, Yalta and Potsdam.

Those summits carved up empires, drew new borders and settled world wars. The agenda for the Earth Summit is more far reaching: it sets out to confront not only the world's most pressing environmental problems -- from global warming to deforestation -- but poverty and underdevelopment as well. A five- week preparatory meeting in New York City that ended last month produced 24 million pages of documents. "It's a Herculean task," admits Maurice Strong, the former Canadian oil executive who organized and serves as secretary- general for the giant get-together.

But with one week to go before the opening ceremonies, the outlook for the Rio conference is far from certain. It is still possible that the Earth Summit will be one of those landmark events that change the course of history, recasting the relationship of the nations of the world not only to one another but also to their environment. Or it could end up to be a diplomatic disaster of global proportions, driving the wedge deeper between the industrial countries and developing countries and thus setting back the cause of environmentalism.

The world has changed dramatically since the first Earth Summit, held 20 years ago in Stockholm (and also chaired by the indefatigable Strong). That event, which launched thousands of grass-roots conservation groups around the world and spawned environmental agencies and ministries in more than 115 nations, was held in the shadow of the cold war, when the planet was divided into rival East and West blocs and preoccupied with the perils of the nuclear arms race. With the collapse of the East bloc and the thawing of the cold war, a fundamental shift in the global axis of power has occurred. Today the more meaningful division -- especially on environmental issues -- is not between East and West but between "North" (Europe, North America and Japan) and "South" (most of Asia, Africa and Latin America). And though the immediate threat of nuclear destruction has lifted, the planet is no less at risk.

While there has been some environmental progress in individual countries, the state of the world has mostly gone downhill. Air pollution, a major issue in Stockholm, has grown significantly worse in most cities. Even more alarming, it is now overshadowed by broad atmospheric changes, such as ozone depletion and the buildup of greenhouse gases. According to the Washington- based Worldwatch Institute, one of the hundreds of environmental pressure groups advising the Earth Summit negotiators, the world has lost 200 million hectares (500 million acres) of trees since 1972, an area roughly one-third the size of the continental U.S. The world's farmers, meanwhile, have lost nearly 500 million tons of topsoil, an amount equal to the tillable soil coverage of India and France combined. Lakes, rivers, even whole seas have been turned into sewers and industrial sumps. And tens of thousands of plant and animal species that shared the planet with us in 1972 have since disappeared.

The idea behind the Earth Summit was that the relaxation of cold war tensions, combined with the heightened awareness of these growing ecological crises, offered a rare opportunity to persuade countries to look beyond their national interests and agree to some basic changes in the way they treat the environment. The broad issues are clear: the developed countries of the North have grown accustomed to life-styles that are consuming a disproportionate share of natural resources and generating the bulk of global pollution. Many of the developing countries of the South, for their part, are consuming irreplaceable global resources -- eating the world's seed corn, as it were -- to provide for their exploding populations. And both groups have as an object lesson the now bankrupt countries of the East bloc, whose singularly inefficient path to industrialization has produced some of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever seen.

The solution -- at least in broad outline -- is also fairly clear. The nations of the world must abandon those practices that are self-destructive in favor of what environmentalists like to call "sustainable development." A sustainable society is one that manages its economic growth in such a way as to do no irreparable damage to its environment. By balancing economic requirements with ecological concerns, it satisfies the needs of its people without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations.

A major obstacle to sustainable development in many countries is a social structure that gives most of the nation's wealth to a tiny minority of its people. "A person who is worrying about his next meal is not going to listen to lectures on protecting the environment," says R.K. Pachauri, director of New Delhi's Tata Energy Research Institute. What to Northern eyes seems like some of the worst environmental outrages -- felling rain forests to make charcoal for sale as cooking fuel, for example -- are often committed by people who have no other form of income. Yet if the barriers that keep those people poor have withstood wars of liberation and social revolutions, what are the chances that they will fall in the name of environmentalism?

The disparities that mark individual countries are mirrored in the planet as a whole. Most of its wealth is concentrated in the North. "The reality is that there are many worlds on this planet," says Chee Yokling, a Malaysian representative of Friends of the Earth, "rich worlds and poor worlds." From the South's point of view, it is the rich worlds' profligate consumption patterns -- their big cars, refrigerators and climate-controlled shopping malls -- that are the problem. "You can't have an environmentally healthy planet in a world that is socially unjust," says Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello. Counters a U.S. representative to a presummit negotiating session: "They are trying to lay a collective guilt trip on us because we try to give our people a higher standard of living."

It comes down to a matter of cash. The North has it. The South needs it. And the changes that must be made to achieve sustainable development will not occur unless some of that wealth finds its way from North to South. So far, the industrial nations have held pretty tightly to their purse strings. In March the U.S. did pledge $75 million to help poor countries find ways to reduce the production of gases that may cause global warming; and at the presummit negotiations, there were hints from developed nations that as much as $6 billion in debt relief and other financial guarantees might be forthcoming at the Rio conference itself. But that is a pittance compared with the $125 billion that Strong has said the developed nations will need to contribute annually to protect natural resources and clean up pollution. (The developing countries, he says, would have to put up an additional $500 billion a year.) To put that in context, the annual U.S. defense budget is $290 billion. "The bottom line is money," says Kamal Nath, India's Minister of Environment and Forests. "If the West does not give funds, the Earth Summit will die a natural death."

The tensions between North and South, and the financial conflicts that underlie them, run through every issue before the Rio negotiators -- even to the question of whether those are the proper issues to be discussing. Among the major disagreements:

WHO TURNED UP THE HEAT?

The fact that this past winter in the northern hemisphere was one of the ) warmest in history may be a coincidence. But most scientists agree that all the smoke and fumes and exhaust that humans generate will eventually alter the earth's climate. Those changes could be modest. Or they could trigger coastal flooding, interior droughts, mass exoduses and pockets of starvation. What irks some developing nations -- and in particular Brazil -- is that many people who worry about global warming point their fingers at the release of carbon dioxide from the burning of rain forests. The bigger threats are the CO2 and other greenhouse gases produced in the industrial countries by the burning of fossil fuels. In per capita terms, individuals in the North generate nearly 10 times as much CO2 from energy use as their counterparts in the South.

The problem for the long term is that people in developing countries now want those consumer items that make life in the industrial world so comfortable as well as environmentally costly -- those private cars, refrigerators and air conditioners. If per capita emissions of greenhouse gases in China and India were to rise to the level of those in France, for example, emissions worldwide would jump nearly 70% -- making a deteriorating situation even worse.

A treaty to prevent climate change was to be the centerpiece of the Rio summit. However, poor countries didn't see why their plans for development should suffer in order to rectify a problem they did not create. Some rich nations did not want to sign on to anything that would threaten their life- styles or increase the cost of doing business. Trying to spur agreement, the European Community proposed cutting CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 -- a relatively modest reduction. But the U.S. steadfastly refused to consider any such rigid deadlines. Skeptical about the evidence that global warming will occur, the Bush Administration was concerned that an arbitrary reduction in the output of CO2 would mean a decline in industrial production and a loss of jobs -- a particularly unappealing prospect in an election year.

The climate-change talks had just about reached an impasse when committee chairman Jean Ripert of France took it upon himself to draw up a compromise text liberally sprinkled with what he calls "constructive ambiguities." It requires nations to roll back greenhouse-gas emissions to "earlier levels" by the end of the decade and report periodically on their progress, but the target of reaching 1990 levels becomes merely a voluntary goal. That seemed to do the trick. Despite loud protests by environmentalists that the agreement was too weak, it was adopted two weeks ago and sent on for signature at Rio.

WHO'S POISONING THE OCEANS?

Anyone who has been near the seashore lately -- or listened to Jacques-Yves Cousteau on TV -- knows that the oceans are a mess, littered with plastic and tar balls and rapidly losing fish. But the garbage dumps, the oil spills, the sewage discharges, the drift nets and factory ships are only the most visible problems. The real threats to the oceans, accounting for 70% to 80% of all maritime pollution, are the sediment and contaminants that flow into the seas from land-based sources -- topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides and all manner of industrial wastes. Coral is particularly sensitive to sediment, and the reefs that fringe Asia, Australia and the Caribbean -- and provide a home to many of the world's fish species -- are already starting to die.

Every country contributes to the situation roughly in proportion to its size, although countries that are leveling their forests are making the runoff problem especially bad. Some ocean advocates called for a new global treaty that would deal specifically with land-based pollution. The U.S., on the other hand, favored strengthening existing international agreements to control this pollution, particularly at the national and regional levels. In the end, negotiators adopted the U.S. approach, agreeing that countries should commit themselves to cleaning up the seas but that it was premature to consider drafting a formal global treaty.

WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE?

Except for finances, no issue has divided North and South more sharply than the question of what to do about the world's remaining virgin forests. At the heart of the debate are the tropical rain forests -- and a fundamental difference in how each side sees them. To industrial countries they are a treasure trove of biodiversity and greenhouse-gas "sinks" that absorb CO2 and thus help keep global warming in check. To developing nations the forests are resources ripe for exploitation: potential farmland, a free source of fuel and a storehouse of exotic kinds of wood that command high prices overseas.

The Bush Administration had hoped to make deforestation a showcase issue going into Rio. The presummit discussions opened with a U.S.-inspired proposal for an outright ban on logging in tropical forests. But the developing countries retaliated by demanding that the language cover temperate and boreal (northern) forests as well. The move was clearly aimed at the U.S., which has strenuously resisted any scrutiny of the logging practices in publicly owned ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest.

At a separate conference in Kuala Lumpur earlier this month, Malaysia's feisty Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad reiterated the developing world's hard line on the issue. If the industrial nations think the rain forests are so important for biodiversity and CO2 storage, says Mahathir, why don't the rich, CO2-creating countries pay for the service of preserving those forests, instead of hectoring the poor countries not to utilize one of their few natural resources? Mahathir, of course, is not exactly a disinterested party; his country has been charged with rampant overlogging in peninsular Malaysia and Borneo.

The lines have been so sharply drawn on all the forest-protection of issues that what was originally intended to be a legally binding forestry convention was watered down months ago to a nonbinding "statement of principles" that will probably be adopted at Rio. Whether a full-fledged treaty will be negotiated later is still uncertain.

WHO NEEDS THESE SPECIES?

Not since the dinosaurs were killed off, say biologists, has the world experienced an extinction "spasm" like the man-made one that will wipe out 10% to 20% of the earth's estimated 10 million species of plants and animals by the year 2020. Since at least 50% of those species live in tropical rain forests, past efforts to save them have run into the usual lines of resistance from governments in the South, which resent any kind of meddling from the North. What makes the losses so unacceptable is that they are irreversible; once a species becomes extinct, it is gone forever. After years of negotiation, an international agreement to conserve imperiled species and ecosystems has finally been reached.

Much of the debate in presummit meetings centered on the issue of who owns and controls the genetic information stored in those species. Traditionally, the benefits that come from genetic materials -- seeds, specimens or drugs derived from plants and animals -- go to whoever finds a way to exploit them. Vanilla, for example, was a biological resource found only in Central America. It later became an important cash crop in Madagascar. Now a U.S. biotech company has developed a process to clone the vanilla flavor in a cell culture. If the firm sells the bioengineered version for less than natural vanilla and takes some of the market share, who will compensate the Madagascar farmers? Or the Central American Indians from whose lands the genetic material originated?

Earlier this year it was hoped that the Earth Summit treaty would include a provision making genetic materials of all kinds the sovereign resource of the originating country. Nations would have control over who had access to their genetic resources, and if someone else found a way to make money from them, the originating country would collect royalties on each sale.

The effect of such a treaty could be striking. Rather than viewing concern about endangered species as a barrier that the industrial world is placing in the way of progress, the developing nations might see biodiversity as a resource that, if properly inventoried and managed, could generate real income. The idea, says Thomas Lovejoy, a tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Institution, is "to start thinking about the problem as a joint venture in which both sides have property rights."

But disagreements arose in the late rounds of negotiation that weakened the final text of the treaty. The agreement now states that the North must give the South money and technology to preserve biodiversity and that communities and indigenous peoples should have a financial stake in conserving their native plants and animals. However, the treaty sets out no formula or mechanism for payments for the use of genetic materials.

There are scores of other issues -- large and small -- buried in the drafts of two primary Earth Summit texts: a five-page "declaration" and a 600-plus- page "blueprint for action" called Agenda 21. The shorter statement, originally called the Earth Charter, was supposed to be a soaring preamble, along the lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The longer agenda was supposed to specify the problems that the world will face well into the 21st century and how to pay for their solution.

Both documents will be adopted at Rio, but neither bears much resemblance to the original conception. After weeks of debate, the Earth Charter was abandoned and replaced by a woodenly written declaration filled with the kind of pious promises ("eradicating poverty," "eliminat((ing)) unsustainable patterns of production and consumption") that world leaders often make but never keep. In what is perhaps the worst example of bureaucratic obfuscation, ^ the text at one point endorses the promotion of "appropriate demographic policies" -- the nearest negotiators could come to confronting the explosive issue of population control.

Agenda 21 became the main forum for North-South wrangling on every topic imaginable, including the spread of deserts, disposal of toxic wastes and protection of women's rights. In the end, the conferees were able to agree that some of these problems do need to be solved. What they still have not agreed on is the means to solve them. To bring about meaningful change in most of these areas would require overhauling the way the world does business -- from the laws that control international trade to the financial institutions that direct the ebb and flow of capital. That is a task that the negotiators have barely even begun.

Much of the debate has centered on technology, which both sides seem to agree is crucial. The Japanese have already made it a national goal to develop the next generation of environmentally friendly machines and industrial processes -- seeing this as a way that developed countries can strengthen their position in the world economy. The developing nations, still saddled with old, inefficient production techniques, insist that they will never be able to curb pollution without preferential access to new processes and equipment. Some experts fear that both sides have unrealistic expectations of technology, as if it were a magic carpet that would allow primitive societies to skip the Industrial Revolution and go straight to the environmentally friendly 21st century. But after weeks of debate, negotiators were not able to agree on whether what they wanted was technology "transfer" or technology "cooperation," never mind how to achieve them.

Nor were they able to settle how Agenda 21 would be paid for. Any aid would logically be administered by the Global Environmental Facility, a $1.3 billion fund that is run jointly by the World Bank, the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N. Development Program. Environmentalists are suspicious of the GEF because the World Bank, the lending institution through which most international aid has been funneled in the past, has a history of investing primarily in large, ecologically damaging capital projects such as jungle highways and hydroelectric dams. Developing countries resent the GEF because it is effectively controlled by the World Bank, which in turn is dominated by the industrialized countries. They also complain that it targets problems that . the developed world cares about, such as global warming and ozone depletion, rather than issues important to the developing world, including fresh-water supplies and the spread of deserts.

The developing nations want a separate "Green Fund" that they could help manage and control. The donor nations, suspicious of corruption in the governments of the South, have so far refused to budge. And since the North controls the money, its position is likely to prevail. "That's what gets my goat," says Anil Agarwal, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. "They are the environmental crooks, and they have all the levers of power."

Agarwal's comments reflect a new feistiness among developing countries on environmental matters. A coalition of them, called the Group of 77, has put up a remarkably united front in the Earth Summit talks. Led by Indians and Pakistanis, whose language skills and flair for bureaucratic nitpicking serve them well in parliamentary maneuverings, the G-77 nations have effectively resisted what they see as an effort to make them pay for the industrial world's environmental sins. "We may not have been able to get what we want," says India's Pachauri. "But we can draw satisfaction from the fact that we have prevented the West from ramming inequitable and unfair conventions down our throats."

The industrial nations have shown no such solidarity. European nations, pressured by powerful green movements of their own, sound quite progressive on environmental issues, but they are still not very good at enforcing their antipollution laws. Japan, stung by its image as an ecological outlaw for its whaling practices and its insatiable appetite for raw wood, seems determined to present itself in these talks as an environmental world leader.

The countries of the former East bloc have been largely sidelined. Not only are they torn by civil strife, but they are also confronted with hundreds of desperate environmental crises, ranging from an outbreak of malignant tumors in the heavily contaminated Silesia region of southwest Poland to a rash of lung, skin and eye disorders among Bulgarian children who live near chemical plants on the Danube River. Eastern Europe's governments, barely able to keep their economies moving, have little money to clean up pollution. In presummit negotiations the main role of what used to be called the second world was to insist that any funds for the developing nations be matched with set-asides for the "economies in transition."

The U.S. -- the world's richest nation and its single biggest polluter -- has stood in the way of progress on many of the most closely watched summit issues. While senior officials held briefings painting the Bush Administration as pro-environment, U.S. delegates backed the status quo on one topic after another, insisting over and over that "the American life-style is not up for negotiation."

Hopes for a compromise lifted briefly in late March when the head of the American delegation, Assistant Secretary of State Curtis Bohlen, announced that the U.S. had reversed itself and accepted the idea that "new and additional financial resources" would be needed to pay for environmental action in poor countries. But Bohlen would not say how much the U.S. might be willing to pledge.

In the end, negotiators despaired of settling the funding questions in advance and agreed to reopen the issue in Rio. Some observers think the Group of 77 may have made a tactical blunder by pushing so hard for financial and technical aid. Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the U.N., has called it a "diplomatic mistake of the highest magnitude." Others criticize the Earth Summit organizers, who by putting so many environmental problems on the negotiating table may have inadvertently ensured that none of them get solved.

By linking environmentalism and development, the conferees have brought to the surface a fundamental conflict in the way man and nature measure progress -- a conflict between economics and ecology. To an economist, weighing things like savings, investments and growth, ecological concerns are secondary considerations to be factored into the larger econometric model. Ecologists studying the complex relationships of living things to their environment know from experience that treating nature like a limitless resource leads, eventually, to irreversible collapse.

In the negotiations leading up to the Earth Summit, individual nations have acted like ecologists on external matters and economists on their own internal affairs. This is, perhaps, to be expected. Making sacrifices for the good of the planet requires negotiating away some measure of national sovereignty, something no country does with grace.

That is not likely to change when those 100 or so heads of state meet in Rio next week. If the world's environmental problems did not get solved in two ! years of preparatory negotiations, they can hardly be settled in 10 days dominated by banquets, receptions and photo opportunities. But it is not too late to salvage something of great value from the Earth Summit. If the leaders who go there -- and the people watching them from around the world -- can be convinced that the crisis facing the planet is serious enough to demand a new alliance between North and South, then there is hope that what did not get accomplished on the road to Rio may at least get started on the way home.

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York, Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Anita Pratap/New Delhi