Ranjit Devraj

Environmentalists attending the WSF have a wish. They want to see the spirit and momentum of Porto Alegre carried to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) or Rio+10 in Johannesburg come September.

Vandana Shiva, founder of the India-based Research Foundations for Science, Technology and Environment (RFSTE) said she expected governments to use the failure to stick to commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro as an excuse to push the globalisation agenda.

She summed up the likely attitudes of governments to be: 'Sorry we can't run our water systems, we are bad at running municipalities so let Bechtel take over. We can't really provide food to our people - let Cargill and Monsanto take over.'

Worse, some NGOs would be helping the government process towards globalisation and even joining hands with forces in the North, she warned adding that genuine NGOs and civil society representatives would be making commitments to the future in preparing for Johannesburg.

In September serious activists will demand that government delegates to the Rio+10 conference endorse the treaty which cuts through all the hoopla surrounding gene patents to hold that the earth's gene pool cannot be patented for the simple reason that it is not a human invention.

The parties to the treaty, expected to include signatory nation states as well as indigenous people, must agree to administer the gene pool as a trust and acknowledge the sovereign right and responsibility of every nation and homeland to oversee their own biological resources and determine how they may be shared.

Walden Bello, environmental activist from the Philippines and director of Focus on the Global South, said the fact that there were already references to a 'global deal' rather than a global agreement already suggested that something shady was afoot.

'Civil Society should be focusing on the process of making a deal or agreement - there should be no more agreements negotiated behind people's backs and we must ensure that whatever is agreed upon is achieved democratically,' Bello said.

Bello said the Earth Summit's Agenda 21 was a failure because it actually allowed corporations to wriggle out of sustainable development and ultimately fulfilled the boast made at Rio that the 'American lifestyle' was not up for negotiation.