By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 21 2012 (IPS)

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro has been described as one of the largest international conferences in the history of the United Nations, attracting over 20,000 participants, including more than 100 world leaders.

Credit: Courtesy of Tommy Koh

The landmark summit, which strongly reaffirmed that environment was an integral part of development, endorsed Agenda 21, a global plan of action for sustainable development, and also the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.

Additionally, the summit also approved the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity – besides the creation of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD).

In an interview with IPS, Ambassador Tommy Koh of Singapore, who chaired the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) of the Earth Summit, admitted that the long drawn-out negotiations “were very difficult” – and went on until the 59th minute of the eleventh hour.

There were four sessions of the PrepCom, twice in Geneva, and one each in Nairobi and New York, with final negotiations going right down to the wire just before the world leaders arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he said.

“I recall that on the last day, the negotiations went through the night and ended at 6:00 am,” Ambassador Koh said, recounting the protracted round-the-clock meetings back in June 1992 (which is likely to happen at the upcoming Rio+20 summit in Brazil, according to U.N. officials).

Through that long night, he said, “I did not know whether we would succeed or fail.”

“As chair of the negotiations in Rio, I was, however, determined to succeed and sought to overcome the divisions and other obstacles with patience, determination and strong collective leadership,” said Koh, a skilled diplomat who also served as his country’s ambassador to the United States, and presided over the Law of the Sea Conference when it adopted a major international treaty governing the oceans back in the 1980s.

Koh spoke to IPS U.N. bureau chief Thalif Deen a month before the Rio+20 summit convenes to take stock and chart a future path.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last week that an estimated 70,000 people, including over 100 world leaders, are expected to gather in Brazil in June, more than triple the 20,000 participants two decades ago.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How would you characterise the successes and failures of the Earth Summit? Were there any lasting or tangible gains?

A: The 1992 Earth Summit has brought about a paradigm shift in the world. Because of that summit, all the 193 member states of the United Nations have a ministry of the environment or an environmental protection agency. In every country of the world, sustainable development is the new norm.

Q: How did it impact on the developing world?

A: In the developing world, there is no longer a constituency for those who believe in development at any cost or to get rich first and clean up later. I consider these as some of the tangible gains of the Earth Summit.

Q: After 20 long years, there are sceptics who say the global environment has gone from bad to worse: greenhouse gas pollution, climate change, deforestation, conspicuous consumption of food, water and energy, rising population and the gradual destruction of the marine ecosystems. What are your thoughts on this?

A: It is regretfully true that, at the global level, we have made no progress in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases or in slowing down the loss of forests, natural habitats and biodiversity or in the good management of our oceans. However, at the national and regional levels, significant progress has been made.

Take Singapore as an example. The love of nature and the will to live in harmony with nature has been growing. As a result, in spite of our high population density, 47 percent of our land area is covered in greenery.

Singapore has also taken the lead in galvanising support from the contracting parties of the Convention on Biodiversity to adopt the Singapore Cities Index on Biodiversity. We have made tremendous progress in the efficient use of water and recycling of waste water. The public opinion strongly supports the growing trend towards green buildings, energy-efficient appliances and green technologies.

Q: The current PrepCom apparently still remains divided – also on North-South lines – on a global action plan for a sustainable future, to be adopted next month. How difficult was the negotiations on Agenda 21? Any advice to the PrepCom?

A: Twenty years later, the world has become more inter-dependent and, at the same time, more divided. The United States is facing both a weak recovery and a presidential election. The European Union (EU) is seeking to restore confidence in the Euro, to reduce its sovereign debt and stimulate growth.

These are difficult times for the West. It will be hard for them to make bold decisions and commitments. However, there is so much at stake. Failure is not really an option. I am confident that Rio+20 will end successfully.

Q: How did the Earth Summit meet the funding demands of developing countries?

A: The funding demands were met in three ways: by creating the Global Environmental Facility (GEF); by increased official development assistance (ODA), specifically earmarked for sustainable development; and by commitments by the various international financial and development institutions.

Q: What influence did the report of the Brundtland Commission (on the global environment) have on the Earth Summit?

A: The Brundtland Commission Report was an inspiration for me and my colleagues.

(END)

Excerpt:

European civil society organisations continue to demand that international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to their internal affairs that they demand for governments across the world.

These demands are being made just ahead of the spring meetings the IFIs will hold later this month in Washington D.C., and refer in particular to the nomination of a new president for the World Bank.

“The election of the new president of the Bank is typical of the lack of transparency and democracy that reigns in the international financial institutions,” Peter Chowla, an economist working for the Bretton Woods project (BWP), told IPS.

The BWP, a London-based international coalition of economists and anti-globalisation activists, focuses its work on the IFIs, to challenge their power, open policy space, and promote alternative approaches.

Traditionally, the U.S. government and the European Union share the leading positions at the IFIs. While the U.S. government occupies the coveted presidency of the World Bank with a candidate of its own, the EU places one European technocrat at the helm of the IMF – no fair election process precedes either of these appointments.

Last year, the French government obtained the backing of European governments to name former French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, despite vociferous opposition from developing countries.

This year, U.S. president Barack Obama has nominated Korean-born physician Jim Yong Kim to become the Bank’s next president.

Although there are two alternative candidates for the position, the present Nigerian minister of finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and her former Colombian counterpart José Antonio Ocampo, it is taken as given that Kim’s candidacy will obtain the support of European countries, and that he will be elected during the bank’s board hearings scheduled to take place in Washington from Apr. 9-11.

It is expected that the confirmation of Kim as new president will be announced on Apr. 11.

Chowla recalled that such “opaque processes” of nomination were conceived more than 60 years ago, when the IFIs were founded, and no longer fit into “the present global economic and political structures.”

But disagreements between European civil society organisations and the IFIs go beyond nomination procedures, and include the institutions’ policy recommendations for governments about management of climate change financial facilities.

Jeroen Kwakkenbos, policy and advocacy officer at the European Network on Debt and Development, told IPS that the World Bank had “neither a mandate nor the qualifications” to participate in the management of the future Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to administrate future financial resources for adaptation and mitigation of climate change, or of REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries).

“We urge the IFIs to remain outside the management of these facilities,” Kwakkenbos told IPS. “Such entities should be managed under democratic principles – that is, one country, one vote, following representation of stake holders in the boards of the organisations.”

Chowla stressed that the main problem with the IFIs is that these institutions continue to apply the neoliberal doctrine that characterised them throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

“These characteristics are deregulation, privatisation, and bilateral free trade agreements between industrialised and emerging countries,” Chowla pointed out. “Four years after the global financial crisis broke out, there are no tangible signs of new regulation of financial flows.”

Chowla specifically mentioned the financial flows to emerging countries, which have triggered important dislocations of exchange rates, leading to what some economists have dubbed “the currency war”.

“(A)symmetry in the recovery of developing countries and the recessions in Europe after the crisis have led to major and unstable short term capital flows to developing countries,” Chowla stated.

These flows have proved to be significantly destabilising, causing sharp appreciation of currencies of emergent developing countries such as Brazil.

Chowla said that the IMF analysis of this destabilising monetary phenomenon on emerging countries is flawed, because it is either based on econometric exercises relying on highly uncertain variables, or on the Fund’s own policy recommendations, which the authorities have not yet even agreed with.

Furthermore, the Bank and the Fund have helped to impose austerity programmes upon European countries already suffering deep economic downturns, regardless of the dramatic social consequences of cuts in public spending and social welfare, Chowla said.

Chowla also mentioned the support the World Bank continues to offer for privatisation programmes across the world.

“In Romania,” he said, “the Bank is the main force behind the planned highly controversial privatisation of the local health system, opposed by unions and civil society groups.”

Other groups, such as the Europe Corporate Observatory, raise similar complaints against the Bank and the IMF, for supporting free trade agreements (FTAs) with developing countries, which obviously damage local public health initiatives and food provision.

The most salient case is the European FTA with India, slated to come into force this year, which would force the Indian pharmaceutical industry to cease producing inexpensive generic medications to treat contagious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, which most of the developing world is dependent on as a cheap alternative to patented drugs.