ENVIRONMENT: Disappointment at Progress in Sustainable Development

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 1999 (IPS) - Environmental activists praised the latest session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) Friday for dealing with tourism and pirate fishing but were critical of the lack of overall progress.

Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) complained at the close of the two-week session that the Commission had failed to take strong action to halt the expansion of commercial fishing, industrial shrimp farming or subsidies to fishing vessel owners.

On most key issues, governments failed to reach consensus, the groups said.

“This CSD session was a disappointment,” declared Mike Hagler, fisheries campaigner for Greenpeace International. “Progress continues to be quite slow…particularly with regard to overfishing and commercial fishing.”

Simon Upton, New Zealand’s environmental minister and chairman of the CSD talks, acknowledged that governments could not reach consensus on key ocean management issues, including subsidies, ‘eco-labeling’ and the transit of hazardous waste.

But he argued that such disagreements were more honest than any attempt to reach what he called “a lowest-common-denominator consensus”.

The CSD, for example, was able to issue a text on oceans and seas regarding the prohibition of international shipments of hazardous waste while noting that some nations called for shipments to be “safe and secure.” Yet the Commission was not able to reach a consensus on these proposals, he said.

Upton said he preferred language that honestly stated disagreements among nations to those which offered a watered-down compromise while some NGOs worried that there was simply too little agreement on many key areas.

Hagler argued that, despite the need for action to curtail the expansion of shrimp farming, the CSD text offered only “very mild, toned-down language” on the need for sustainable aquaculture.

Gordon Bispham of the NGO Network Barbados added that, even on the matter of hazardous waste shipment, the text reflected the efforts by some nations to replace the wording of “waste” with “fuel” – a switch, he said, that could have unexplored legal implications.

Bispham said that the session had done little to address the needs of small island states – although those states’ concerns are to be the subject of a special session of the UN General Assembly this September.

Upton noted that the session had produced a text – the contents of which have yet to win full agreement – that could serve as the basis of the September meeting.

The two-week session brought together more than 70 government ministers in what Upton described as an open dialogue on fishing, tourism and other environmental issues. It did produce several breakthroughs as well.

Perhaps the most important was a call from the CSD for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to act against illegal and unreported fishing, including “pirate” fishing.

The governments criticised “states which do not fulfill their responsibilities under international law as flag states with respect to their fishing vessels”.

Some companies used “flags of convenience” from states which do not monitor the actions of ships flying under their flags to “roam the world’s oceans, plundering fish stocks at will,” Hagler said.

Yet other agreements were harder to achieve. Many delegates reported a growing consensus in favour of cutting subsidies to fishing fleets but no action was taken.

Subsidies to fishing fleets were estimated at some 20 billion dollars each year and environmental groups blamed the practise for contributing to overfishing and the depletion of global fish stocks.

According to the FAO, more than 60 percent of the world’s fish stocks are depleted – a loss that is accelerated by the discarding of about a quarter of all the fish that are caught annually, Upton said. Yet the CSD talks, like most UN gatherings, often failed to find consensus on issues where regional ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ were delineated.

The idea of ‘eco-labeling’, or labeling fish and other goods that are sold by companies observing environmental regulations, caught the attention of many European states – but was resisted by companies who feared the practise could hurt their business.

Similarly, argued Frans de Mann of the Retour Foundation, a Netherlands NGO, some delegations tried to include in a CSD call for sustainable tourism language that would seek a halt to the ‘child sex tourism’ trade. But some Southeast Asian and other nations, worried about being stigmatised as centres of the trade, resisted the inclusion of such language, sources said.

Ultimately, Upton argued, the meeting succeeded at bringing environmental officials into a real dialogue and achieving some progress – if occasionally mild – on environmental concerns.

In addition, the meeting avoided being derailed by a Russian proposal for a resolution condemning the environmental damage of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation attacks on Yugoslavia.

On Friday, in an unprecedented CSD vote, 33 nations voted for the body to take no action at all on Russia’s proposal, while only four nations – Russia, China, North Korea and Zimbabwe – voted against the “no-action” measure and eight abstained.

“I don’t think we should see (the Yugoslavia vote) in any way as undermining the agenda,” Upton said after the vote.