ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Integration Needed to Curb Destruction

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 27 1995 (IPS) - Latin American and Caribbean governments must step up integration of their efforts if they are to head off continued environmental destruction in the region, concluded a ministerial-level meeting held in Cuba.

According to Arsenio Rodriguez, the regional director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), only South-South cooperation will allow such challenges to be tackled in a world where development aid is increasingly “drying up.”

That issue was the central focus of the ninth regional meeting in which 14 environment ministers and other high-level officials from 11 countries participated in Havana on Monday and Tuesday.

Although the meeting did not come up with common policies to be undertaken by governments in the region, it identified shared positions with regards to the international environmental agenda, and urged a search for effective coordination mechanisms.

These could lead in the future to a search for solutions to the problems of supplying clean water and sewer systems, marine pollution, protection of forests and biodiversity, and the transportation of toxic waste.

U.N. sources estimate that by the year 2000, nearly 60 percent of the urban population of Latin America and the Caribbean will live in cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants, and 30 percent in cities of over one million.

The region’s natural habitats are being destroyed to open new land for crop cultivation and livestock grazing, with increasingly alarming consequences in terms of the conservation of biodiversity.

While only 2.2 percent of the region’s entire surface area is dedicated to natural reserves, the rate of deforestation holds steady at 50,000 square kilometres a year, and desertification has affected 10 percent of the region.

“The sustainability of Latin America is not only a question of natural resources, but also one of social development and reduction of inequalities,” said Colombian Environment Minister Cecilia Lopez Montano.

A UNEP report presented during the meeting states that under- development and social inequality lead to a vicious circle of environmental deterioration that clearly demonstrates the interrelationship between the economic context and environmental issues.

Although Colombia has “nearly 40 percent of the world’s biodiversity, it has not yet resolved its human problems,” said Lopez Montana, stressing that poverty in her country has not been reduced in spite of the national economy having steadily grown over the last 50 years.

Meanwhile, she warned that “it is very dangerous for our ministries to be seen as ‘Green’ entities rather than as institutions for development,” referring to the risk of isolation that environment ministries face within their respective governments.

The ministers agreed to meet a year from now in Argentina, and to hold regular regional meetings, converting them into a decision- making forum designed to implement Agenda 21, adopted in the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.

UNEP observers said in Havana that such an effort would make Latin America and the Caribbean the first region to attempt to coordinate environmental policies among governments.

“When countries speak as a region, they are much stronger than when they do so on their own,” said UNEP executive director Elizabeth Dondeswell.

Dondeswell stressed the importance of the region adopting a common position with respect to negotiations on desertification, biodiversity, climatic change and toxic waste.

She added that the international community has made some progress since the 1992 Earth Summit, but recognised that the same cannot be said regarding the transfer of resources from industrialised to developing countries.