Development concerns have proven a veritable minefield at the Earth Summit in South Africa, reports Yehia Ghanim from Johannesburg Click to view caption The chief of the explosives brigade scrupulously checked the white Volvo in the underground car park adjacent to the centre where the international summit for sustained development is being held. He assured me the car, parked only a few metres away from mine, was clean and that the call notifying the police that it was set to explode had been a hoax. And so it proved. Yet there are plenty of other bombshells around to disrupt the activities of the Earth Summit in South Africa, and most of them are contained in the agenda and draft closing statement. From day one of the summit, which began last Tuesday in Johannesburg, it was obvious that there was a vast gulf separating the developing nations of the South from the developed nations of the North over a range of major issues. Foreign debt, opening the markets of industrialised nations to developing countries, deregulation in finance and trade -- all crucial issues for the success of the summit, and all potential minefields. The distance separating the two sides becomes glaringly obvious in the final resolution document that the conference will issue. Among the most controversial passages is Article 75, which focusses on the mechanisms necessary to achieve internationally agreed upon targets and which reconfirms the principle, adopted at the Rio Summit, of communal, if variously allocated, responsibilities for achieving such objectives. Article 76, which stipulates that developed nations must fulfil pledges to augment official development aid -- currently only 0.7 per cent of the developed nations' GNP goes to help the world's least developed nations -- was always going to cause problems. As was Article 77, which calls upon donor and recipient nations and international institutions to use development aid more efficiently, and Article 78, which seeks to optimise the benefits accruing from existing funding mechanisms and institutions. Articles 80 through 82 offered, if anything, even greater potential for contention. The first calls for the alleviation of the debt burdens shouldered by developing nations, with radical suggestions including the writing off of Third World debt and its replacement with sustainable development aid. Western nations, predictably, objected to the article, insisting that it is necessary to review individual cases separately. Article 81 calls on WTO members to implement the resolutions of the Doha Ministerial Conference, including increased technical aid to developing nations and the lifting of protectionist measures blocking developing nations from accessing the markets of industrialised countries, while Article 82 deals with ways in which to help countries dependent upon primary materials to diversify their exports, including provisions to stabilise prices in order to counter market fluctuations. But Johannesburg was not only the backdrop to North-South disputes. Jordan must take the credit for introducing inter-Arab disputes following its announcement of a joint Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli project to preserve the Dead Sea. The project's sponsors claim that the level of the Dead Sea is declining rapidly because of dams constructed in Syria. The fourth day of the conference, then, witnessed a stormy meeting between Arab participants. The Syrian delegation maintained that it was abiding by its water agreements with Jordan while the Palestinians asserted that they had not been a party to the project in the first place. The Palestinian delegation further declared that Jordan's announcement of the project was intended to serve political, rather than environmental, objectives. But while frayed tempers in the assembly halls and conference rooms were masked behind the language of diplomacy, this has not been the case in the grounds outside. As is now common with UN- sponsored global conferences, angry demonstrations frequently spilled over into violence. Among the most dramatic was a large Ethiopian demonstration condemning Eritrea for depriving their country of any access to the sea, and a brawl between Palestinians and Israelis, after the latter had tried to break up a Palestinian rally calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti. Against such a backdrop, and with so many vested interests meeting head on, no one seems to hold out much hope for the conference producing anything beyond the most vaguely worded resolutions that will, in any case, not be binding. And as the conference progressed it became increasingly apparent that the organisers had rigged the agenda so that it would begin by discussing the issues most likely to meet with a unanimity of opinion. The most controversial issues, meanwhile, have been deliberately deferred to the last days of the conference. Hopes, then, are not high and the summit is unlikely to produce solid results in favour of the Third World. Which leads us into a by-now traditional scenario. As at most recent major UN conferences, it will be left to the NGO forum to submit its own demands to the official summit.
