Various non-governmental organisations on Friday warned United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan that the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development was in danger of collapse.
In a letter to Annan, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace warned that governments were continuing to put corporate globalisation before the interests of people and the
planet.
This assessment by the environmental groups emerged at the end of the first week of the final preparatory meeting in Bali for the summit in Johannesburg in August and September.
The letter asks Annan to rescue the ”stagnant Bali meeting”.
”Unless Kofi Annan intervenes to raise the political stakes before ministers arrive on Monday, the Earth Summit will end up as Rio minus 10, not Rio plus 10,” said Remi Parmentier, political director of Greenpeace International.
A summit co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth, Daniel Mittler, said: ”People all over the world are protesting against corporate globalisation – but governments continue to sacrifice the Earth Summit on the altar of Exxon, Monsanto and co.”
The letter says that none of the governments seem to have taken Annan’s call to rehabilitate the planet seriously.
”Governments continue to put corporate globalisation before the interests of people and the planet.
”Your vision that together we can and must write a new and hopeful chapter in natural and human history is being flatly ignored. Governments have failed to respond to the global call to establish social and environmental limits to economic globalisation,” the letter says.
”The central problem is a lack of concrete actions, targets and timetables and the absence of means of implementation and financial resources.” – Sapa