Mark Malloch-Brown, head of the United Nations development programme, gave his first speech to the main UN conference at the World Summit in Johannesburg. It was monumentally boring, he freely admitted, and the former man from Economist magazine expected few to have paid much attention.
”You have to listen to everyone saying the same bloody things. The international negotiations and governmental declarations will be forgotten within minutes of the ink being signed on the paper,” he said.
The most monstrous meeting the world has ever conceived has now ended. The main conference, with its tortuous governmental negotiations, got the attention, but there were 18 other smaller summits and parallel events taking place, and each day the three pillars of the world community — governments, business and civil society — spewed out several thousand statements, pacts, initiatives, declarations, partnerships, deals, position papers, responses and challenges.
Lawyers, children, scientists, leaders of the world’s cement and mining companies, fertiliser and tourist industries, human rights workers, conservationists, waste managers and local government officers all had a platform.
As trade unions met in one venue, city traders held a press conference in another to accuse the police of extortion. While the landless were marching, Oxfam was dumping tons of sugar on the European Union delegation’s doorstep, Friends of the Earth had mobilised a squatter community and a police horse had bolted across town as a helicopter flew too low.
This Earth Summit was the world’s biggest ever meeting, and one of its most surreal. John Gummer, the former British environment secretary, was found staring into the ice-filled urinals of the neo-Italianate, hollow-pillared Michelangelo hotel where the world’s leading businessmen and heads of state were staying.
”Is this sustainable development? No one can explain it to me,” he said.
Meanwhile the World Bank sponsored messages on 65 000 recycled toilet rolls the delegates used.
No one pretended to grasp it all, but the feeling is growing that Johannesburg will definitively change the relationship between civil society, business and governments over the next 10 years.
”Rio de Janeiro in 1992 saw the start of the flowering of non-government groups. Johannesburg will be seen as the Crystal Palace of sustainable development,” Malloch-Brown said. ”It is a great trade fair. Civil society is unnecessarily alarmed that big business is here in such force. But obviously, there is a risk that this whole thing will get hijacked by the PR companies.”
The future, he says, is partnerships, and some pretty bizarre marriages are being consummated.
As of the summit, McDonald’s is an official Unicef partner. The children’s agency and one of the most vilified companies in the West will team up to raise money for charities, the chair-person of the burger chain said.
Meanwhile, conservationists are linking with logging companies. Greenpeace, which has been attacking South African nuclear and chemical plants, has linked up with Shell, Monsanto and the mining giant RTZ in the Business Council for Sustainable Development. Last week one of Greenpeace’s boats was alongside the South African navy tracking a Spanish trawler fishing illegally.
There were more than 100 United States groups in Johannesburg and most were apologetic. The US, despite announcing what it called $4,5-billion in aid, was the butt of most delegates’ comments. ”By trading off water against renewable energy … they are pissing on the poor,” said an outraged French group.
The real action took place well away from the convention centre.
The World Bank attacked the US for its stance on climate change, while the bank itself was lambasted by anti-privatisation water groups.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, the giant French water company Suez, which now has 30-year rights on much of Southern Africa’s water resources, was insisting that its investments had brought clean, safe water to more than 2,5-million people.
Few industrialists want international attention, but Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairperson of Shell and now head of the Business Council for Sustainable Development, declared that it was a myth that business was not in favour of government regulation.
”There is a great deal of mutual distrust [between government groups and business], but why should business not be here?” he asked critics.
”Because they are polluting and profiteering,” piped up an Indian activist. He was with several survivors of the Bhopal tragedy, in which thousands of people were killed by a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in India.
Down in the main convention press room — a hurriedly converted underground car park with about 10 toilets for 4500 press — Ann Pettifor, the founder of Jubilee 2000, tried to call a press conference. Tempers were frayed. ”No one is bloody interested in good news,” she said. According to her calculations, debt relief has begun to work. ”Education has benefited by more than $380-million, spending on health by more than $330-million,” she said.
The hot air is incalculable. ”I haven’t a clue what is going on elsewhere,” said Keith Ewing of the British charity Tearfund. ”I have been concentrating on sanitation and lobbying governments. A child dies every 15 seconds for the lack of a loo and can you believe that the US, Australia and Canada are holding out against an agreement that would halve that number by 2015?” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002