The Earth Summit was deadlocked on Wednesday over vast farm subsidies in rich nations and globalisation despite progress on trade and financing Third World aid, a key negotiator said.
”We have come a long way,” said John Ashe, the delegate from Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean who is trying to broker a deal on trade and aid finance at the mammoth 10-day summit which will in Johannesburg end on September 4.
”But we haven’t resolved issues of subsidies,” he told Reuters in a break in the talks on Wednesday evening. Defining globalisation was also among issues still dividing delegates from almost 200 nations.
He said that it looked increasingly likely that civil servants might have to give up and hand the most thorny problems to environment ministers to resolve in coming days.
Many poor nations say the United States is the main block, refusing more aid or fresh environmental targets at the summit which is meant to find ways to halve global poverty by 2015 and promote economic growth that will not damage the environment.
Developing nations at the World Summit on Sustainable Development say that subsidies paid to farmers in rich nations, totalling about a billion dollars a day, are a protectionist barrier to their exports.
But Washington does not want to go beyond a deal at the World Trade Organisation in Doha last year to make ”substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support”.
NOT BEYOND DOHA
Ashe said that the sections of a draft declaration so far agreed went no further than a restatement of Doha accords.
One disputed section of the Johannesburg text, for instance, says nations should ”reduce or eliminate, as appropriate, environmentally harmful and trade distorting subsidies”.
Environmentalists say the ”as appropriate” means that nations can ignore the recommendation.
One delegate said: ”The world economy’s in worse shape than last year so rich nations reckon that a restatement of Doha is all that developing nations can expect.”
Since Doha, the United States has introduced a new Farm Bill increasing the level of its agricultural subsidies.
Ashe said the delegates were also divided over how to refer to ”globalisation”, a term associated with the spread of Western multinational corporations as well as booming world trade.
The United States wants the final text to preach the benefits of globalisation while groups ranging from developing nations to the European Union are more wary.
The EU, for instance, wanted to say that globalisation could lead to ”negative environmental and social implications and loss of cultural diversity”. France has led EU efforts to preserve protections for cinema and music.
Domestic political considerations are stopping wealthy governments from impoverishing their own farmers and Western officials have sought to focus attention on efforts to improve agricultural production in nations where many are hungry.
Among agreements on Wednesday was a section to ”urge” developed countries to make ”concrete efforts” to reach a U.N. goal, generally ignored since it was first agreed in 1970, to give 0.7 percent of their income to developing nations.
Developed nations give only about a third of that amount, or about $67 from each person a year. Only Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg reach the 0.7 percent target. The United States is bottom of the list, at 0.1 percent.
”To be honest, the 0.7 percent is just totemic so no one can ever let it drop,” one European delegate said. ”But even among developing countries there’s a growing realisation that they would benefit much more from increased trade than more aid.” – Reuters