The World Summit on Sustainable Development looms large over Johannesburg: tens of thousands of attendees are expected, including the greatest-ever gaggle of heads of state; talk-talk-talk is expected and, for ordinary citizens, traffic jams; talk-talk-talk is expected and, for local politicians, an opportunity to sell South Africa; talk-talk-talk is expected and, for the commercially minded, a chance to make a quick buck.
”A giant talk-shop,” you may say. ”A veritable extravagance where done deals will be debated for show, after which there’ll be much self-felicitation. And the world will be lulled into complacence for another decade, led to believe that leaders are on top of things and Earth’s demise postponed. What’s new in it? What’s the use of it all?”
Your cynicism would be understandable. For what do we have from the Rio Earth Summit a decade ago and agreements such as the Kyoto protocol to limit greenhouse emissions but missed goals and an ignominious retreat led by United States President George W Bush?
And what, from our Southern African vantage point, do we have from the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals — a set of targets dramatically to reduce poverty, ill-health and inequality in an environmentally sustainable way between 1990 and 2015 — but a bad start as social indicators dive in the wake of HIV/Aids, instability and increasing hunger?
Past experience inspires no confidence and yes, it is no secret that pre-summit manoeuvring has substantially fixed the agenda for the World Summit.
That agenda will likely play off the need for poverty alleviation against the need to preserve the environment: people versus planet. Yes, there will be pious declarations of the need for development to be sustainable, but the subtext will be the need for development per se as the only means to meet the needs of the poor. (And bingo, what a masterstroke to shut up the pesky greens, for do they really want to deprive the poor?)
There will be no substantial challenge to business as usual; no acknowledgement that development as we know it has increased the wealth gap in most parts of the world; little entertainment even, of debate that would explore a third or a fourth or a fifth way.
In a discussion paper prepared for the World Summit, the World Bank waxes lyrical how growth can reduce poverty and its associated ills. If low-income countries grow at 3,6% a year, the 29% of the world population that lived on $1 a day in 1990 will be halved by 2015.
But even the bank has to acknowledge that is a tall feat. For starters, growth in poor countries has averaged less than half that figure over two decades. And then: ”The benefits of growth must be widely spread, and growth must be environmentally and socially sustainable.” These are nice words, but the bank offers few suggestions — other than improved governance and a tinkering with existing policies — how development as we know it/business as usual can be made to stop raping the Earth and redistributing resources from poor to rich.
Okay, so the World Summit will be a talk-shop full of fluff and fury, with a prescription ready writ: more of the same medicine. No radical surgery to save Patient Earth. You’re right: it seems there will be nothing new.
Enter a small band of women and men, personified by the likes of Dennis Brutus, the South African poet, academic, anti-apartheid campaigner, Robben Islander and exile. People like Brutus are descending on Johannesburg in droves, where they’ll be participating in their own, perhaps more dramatic, events.
Brutus has become something of an Ã