ENVIRONMENT: North, South Still Talk Past Each Other

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 17 1997 (IPS) - When delegates from the industrialised and developing worlds meet to discuss mutual concerns, they often talk past each other — and the ongoing ‘Rio Plus Five’ Forum here is no exception.

While more than 500 delegates from North and South debate ways to protect the environment, five years after the Earth Summit was held here, the lack of real exchange strikes many non-governmental representatives from the South as telling.

“I believe this conference did not wish to address the negative, but I don’t see how it could not,” says Jocelyn Dow of the Guyanese non-governmental organisation ‘Red Threads’. “You can’t only talk about successes (in environmental protection); there are also constraints.”

Yet Dow contends the Mar. 13-19 forum, sponsored by the Costa Rica-based Earth Council, follows a typical pattern: many Northern delegates focus only on success stories about environmental strategies, while those from the South plead for global economic factors to be discussed as well.

“You can’t just talk about sustainability without asking, ‘Sustainability for whom’?” Dow says. Ultimately, she argues, the message of the 1992 Earth Summit that must be preserved is that ordinary people’s lives must in many cases be improved to a level that they can sustain. “It’s not just about protecting the environmen:û” she says.

But whether that message is being heard is an open question. Many NGO representatives doubt that it is. Dr Rosalie Bertell, an expert on environmental health risks from Canada, notes that, although the forum brings together both private-sector and banking interests and civil society groups, the two rarely meet.

“I haven’t seen any of the banking representatives at any of our discussions,” she says. “It seems like they’re arrogant.”

For some, the issue is one of differing attitudes about what the environmental debate involves. Nations like the United States, for example, are eager to present the case that an approach encouraging corportate interests to be more environmentally friendly can yield the highest payoff.

“Today, many businesses are demonstrating that environmentally sound business practises can make good economic sense,” the U.S. President’s Council on Sustainable Development told the forum in a report. “They are improving product quality and production efficiency, reducing energy needs and minimising the costs associated with pollution.”

But not everyone agrees that green corporate policies are the solution to environmental woes. Dow worries such an approach could simply transform environmentalism into another commodity being produced, without taking account of the radically different consumption patterns of the North and South or the economic history behind them.

“Much of this discussion is based on the assumption that business and corporate interests can work toward the same ends as thoe of NGOs and grassroots groups,” says Sumti Kothari, a delegate from India. “That is a false assumption.”

Rather, he argues, the result of fora like ‘Rio Plus Five’ often is simply a debate in which “you still hear a lot of white men talking” while others feel frustrated or marginal to the debate.

Some also wonder whether either the Northern or Southern representatives have much to say at a forum like this.

“The people here all have the same conceptual boxes, so it’s not as if (North and South) are saying anything all that different,” says one Indian delegate, speaking on condition of anonymity. “These are people at the top, so their issues are different from local groups who deal with real problems.”

Still, many of the delegates here have been pleased that, five years after the Rio process began, questions of poverty and equity have become more a part of the environmental debate.

“There is no way to reduce the complexity of societies into the idiot concepts of macroeconomics,” says Hazel Henderson, an economist at the U.S. NGO ‘Alternative Futures’. “Managing a society based on the growth of gross domestic product is like trying to fly a 747 with only one dial on the instrument panel.”

“The market is good at certain things — growth and efficiency, for example,” acknowledges Anders Wijkman of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP). “It’s just not good at equity.” Unless equity and poverty are addressed, he added, the concept of ‘sustainable development,’ the catch phrase for environmentally conscious growth, cannot be realised.