The German election could be the second this year to be won or lost on the environment. In New Zealand, the Labour Party failed to win its anticipated overall majority, partly because of its determination to approve the planting of genetically modified crops.
In Germany Edmund Stoiber seemed certain of victory, until the floods exposed the fact that his shadow Cabinet contains no environment spokesman. As the Indian proverb says, if you drive nature out of the door with a broom, she will come back through the window with a pitchfork.
The environment is a long-term issue that has always suffered from the short-term imperatives of the political cycle. It has been treated, by governments all over the world, as a problem that can be endlessly deferred to the next administration. Now the problem is catching up with the politicians, but most of them have yet to notice.
The fourth World Summit on Sustainable Development, which begins at the end of this week, looks certain to be a disaster.
It’s not just that the summit will fail to resolve the Earth’s problems. Its decisions are likely to become a major cause of environmental destruction in their own right. The solution to the slow collapse of the Earth’s capacity to support human life, both the United Nations and most of the governments of the rich world have decided, is more of the problem.
The UN hopes for two kinds of outcome from the summit, which it calls type I and type II. Type I outcomes are the agreements brokered by governments. These negotiations, like those at all the previous Earth summits, have so far been dominated by the European Union and the United States.
While poorer nations have called for the rich countries to recognise their ecological debt to the rest of the world, to cough up the money they promised and failed to deliver 10 years ago and to find ways of holding big business to account, the rich world has insisted that the interests of the poor and the environment take second place to free trade.
Sections of the world trade agreement have simply been pasted into the draft negotiating text, ensuring that corporate freedom overrides environmental protection. The world’s water supplies, climate, health and biodiversity will, from now on, the rich nations insist, be defended by means of ”public-private partnerships”. To defend the world from the destruction brokered by multinational capital, governments will tie a ribbon round it and hand it to multinational capital.
But if the type I outcomes are likely to harm both the poor and the environment, the type II outcomes could be devastating. The UN has permitted big business to capture not just the results of the negotiations, but also the negotiating process itself. The corporations are moving into the vacuum left by the heads of state and asserting their claim to global governance.
In principle, type II outcomes are voluntary agreements negotiated by governments, businesses and people’s organisations. In practice, the corporations, being better funded and more powerful than the people’s groups, are running the circus. They propose to regulate themselves through codes of practice, which in reality amount to little more than the rebranding of destructive activities as beneficial ones.
These agreements, in other words, will reclassify some of the world’s most destructive corporations as the officially sanctioned saviours of the environment. In the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the UN is helping companies to argue that voluntary self-auditing is an effective substitute for democratic control.
Two weeks ago we learned that while British Prime Minister Tony Blair was intending to leave Michael Meacher, the Environment Minister, behind, he would be travelling with the directors of Rio Tinto and Anglo-American. Meacher, thanks to a public outcry, has been permitted to go to the ball, but nothing would induce Blair to throw the ugly sisters off the plane.
Rio Tinto is the mining company that has attracted more complaints of environmental destruction and abuse of indigenous people’s rights than any other. Anglo-American has been described as the economic pillar of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The governments of the world, in other words, appear to be coming together in Johannesburg to conspire against the interests of their people. This perception contributes, paradoxically, to the problem: the less people feel they can trust their governments, the more political space is cleared for the corporations to colonise.
But the organisation that is likely to suffer most is the UN. The fourth Earth summit — the biggest-ever meeting of heads of state — should enhance the UN’s prestige. Instead, it could destroy it.
Already the ”global compact” the UN has struck with big corporations, lending them credibility in return for unenforcable voluntary commitments, has alienated it from the very people who once sprang to its defence.
Now the UN is seen, especially in the poor world, in the same light as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation: as an instrument of power, deployed against the powerless. Its willingness to help the wreckers of the environment to reposition themselves as the saviours of the world will reinforce this impression.
While the powerful people who wish to acquire for themselves the common property of humankind have always to be flattered and appeased, the long-term survival of humanity is in no politician’s immediate interest; until, that is, the environment bites back. Perhaps the only hope we have is that nature, as she has done in Germany, casts her vote much sooner than the politicians guessed. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002