While economic growth had been unprecedented since the last World Summit in Rio, economic inequality had deepened and environmental degradation accelerated, President Thabo Mbeki said on Tuesday at the passing of the torch ceremony in Brazil.
The passing of the torch from Brazil, host of the Rio Earth Summit, to South Africa — host of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) — symbolised the global community’s responsibility to victims of unsustainable development and to future generations, said Mbeki.
”Growth in the world economy in the year 2000 alone exceeded that during the entire nineteenth century. Yet people continue to die of hunger; babies get born, grow up, and die without being able to read or write; many fellow humans do not have clean water to drink; and, people die of curable diseases. The gulf between rich and poor members of the human race widens as we speak.
”…as (Brazil’s) President Fernando Cardoso, passes on the torch — the flame being Agenda 21 — to the World Summit on Sustainable Development — the ‘Johannesburg World Summit’ — the enormity of the responsibility and challenge becomes tangible,” he said in a speech prepared for delivery in Rio de Janeiro.
”At the Rio Summit the world declared with one voice: ‘Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature’,” he said.
Agenda 21, the definitive document of the 1992 World Summit, highlighted the causal relationship between poverty and environmental degradation, and pointed to the integration of environment and development issues addressed in a global partnership as the only realistic way forward.
The WSSD had to apply the principles of Agenda 21 and focus on action to eradicate poverty.
”Its outcome must make sense to she who has to walk for kilometres to fetch drinking water and to she who spends hours gathering firewood for energy. It must also speak to he who consumes more than the earth can give.”
Mbeki said the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held three decades ago in Stockholm, Sweden, had set off unprecedented global concern about the negative impact of human activity on the environment but this had gone on unabated, subjected to a development model that ”is questioned daily by the earth’s ecosystem on which all life and all economic activity is dependent”.
Developed countries’ excessive consumption of natural resources could not go unchecked.
”If the Chinese citizen is to consume the same quantity of crude oil as his or her US counterpart, China would need over 80 million barrels of oil a day — slightly more than the 74 million barrels a day the world now produces. If annual paper use in China of 35kg per person were to climb to the US level of 342 kilograms, China would need more paper than the world currently produces.”
Since 1994, he said South Africa had provided seven million more people with access to clean water, built over one million low-cost homes, provided over two million more homes with electricity and afforded every child an opportunity to go to school.
”At the time of Rio this was all just a dream… we all know that people can change and that it is possible to change the lives of the poor. We also must believe that it is possible for us to live in harmony with nature.”
A global partnership for sustainable development and for the eradication of poverty was within reach and genuine human solidarity was possible and necessary, he said.
”Nobody can truthfully argue that the global community of nations is too poor to defeat global poverty. Nobody can truthfully argue that there is a larger human imperative or decisive constraint that makes it obligatory that we must destroy the environment. Together we must give real meaning to the solemn pledge that was made in this city 10 years ago (Agenda 21).” – Sapa