City built on waste just the spot for Earth Summit
Date: 19-Aug-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Ed Stoddard
A microcosm of the North/South income gap with wretched slums mushrooming near posh neighbourhoods, Johannesburg is also an ecological oasis with a botanical bounty that attracts an astonishing variety of bird species.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development from August 26 to September 4 will seek to hammer out a blueprint for reducing global poverty and hunger while stemming the spread of killer diseases such as AIDS.
It will also attempt to come up with concrete plans for providing clean water, sanitation, and energy to the planet's many have-nots without harming the environment.
Johannesburg, and South Africa more generally, underscores these challenges, often in dramatic and visible ways.
One study on inequality in South Africa in 1998 found that only Brazil's income disparities were greater.
Fifty percent of South Africa's population received only 11 percent of total income, while the richest seven percent rake in more than 40 percent.
STARK CONTRASTS
The delegates will gather in the upscale suburb of Sandton, just four kilometres from the teeming township of Alexandra.
The two neighbourhoods illustrate the stark global contrasts that the summit aims to tackle.
Sandton is a flashy financial district. Its mostly white residents live in plush homes hidden behind high walls.
Alexandra is black and poor. Many of its residents live in corrugated iron shacks without running water or electricity.
Lifting these people out of poverty, and raising their consumption rates for fuel, water and other goods in a sustainable way, is the global challenge the summit faces.
The delegates will also find themselves in the epicentre of the world's AIDS crisis as they jet into a country where one in nine people are infected with the HIV virus - a pandemic that is adding to poverty and tearing at the fabric of society.
Their drive from the airport will take them past unsightly mine dumps, reminders that this city was built on the waste of an industry that has killed tens of thousands of mostly black workers while fouling the environment since gold was discovered here in 1886.
And just across South Africa's borders, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi are facing food shortages that have put 13 million people at risk of starvation.
NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
Johannesburg and South Africa also offer some rays of hope.
Since 1994, the government has given seven million people access to clean water, mostly in rural areas. Municipalities like Johannesburg have hooked up another three million.
Another seven million still need water piped to them, but South Africa has already met the U.N.'s global Millennium target of reducing by half by 2015 the proportion of people who have no access to, or cannot afford, clean water.
Johannesburg is also a green jewel in a semi-arid region.
About 200 species of birds - including spotted eagle owls - have found refuge in its affluent northern suburbs, where well-watered gardens boast a stunning variety of plant species.
"There are bird species in Johannesburg, such as grey louries, that you did not see 20 years ago," said ornithologist Ulrich Oberprieler, who is deputy director at the Pretoria Zoo.
But Johannesburg's greenery is a double-edged sword as it stems from high consumption rates of scarce water supplies.
