Mandela brings poverty summit back down to Earth
Date: 30-Aug-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Darren Schuettler
Mandela, speaking away from grand and heavily guarded Johannesburg convention centre that is hosting the mammoth, 10-day Earth Summit, painted a bleak picture of privation and thirst in South Africa's Eastern Cape.
"When I return, as I often do, to the rural village and area of my childhood and youth, the poverty of the people and the devastation of the natural environment painfully strikes me," the 84-year-old former president said of his native Qunu.
"It is the absence of clean water that strikes (me) most starkly," added Mandela, whose selfless struggle against apartheid made him a moral authority for Africa and the world.
He was launching an exhibition on ways to provide clean water to poor communities, a key goal of the United Nations and a major topic at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Since Monday delegates from nearly 200 countries have debated a U.N. action plan to ease poverty while preserving the planet.
Delegates made some headway in overcoming differences this week but were deadlocked on the issue of subsidies paid to Western farmers that hold back imports from Africa and Asia.
The trade debate spilled onto the streets outside the centre in the wealthy suburb of Sandton, where 200 poor farmers and local street traders from nearby shanty townships shouted slogans demanding freer trade and more access to markets.
"We want the freedom to grow what we want, when we want, with what technology we want, and without trade-distorting subsidies or tariffs," said Barun Mitra, an Indian farm activist leading about 30 farmers from his country.
There was progress between rich and poor states on demands by Third World countries for more aid finance, and U.N. organisers also reported progress in setting firm targets and deadlines for improving the state of healthcare and fish stocks among a vast array of proposals on the summit agenda.
WEALTHY COWS VS FREER TRADE
John Ashe, a Caribbean delegate who has been brokering a compromise, said they agreed on "99 percent" of aid proposals during late night talks. But he said ministers or even heads of government may have to get involved next week if the deadlock over subsidies and how to characterise globalisation continues.
The United States has drawn fire for a new Farm Bill set to boost subsidies to domestic farmers, whereas radical plans to reform Europe's farm support policy have left the continent bitterly divided over French-led opposition to the plan.
U.S. President George W. Bush will not attend the summit, although about 100 other world leaders will come next week.
Many delegates said the United States was leading resistance to setting targets going beyond a world trade deal struck in Doha last year to phase out export subsidies and to make "substantial reductions in trade-distorting domestic support".
Environmentalists complained about the horsetrading: "We see the U.S. inserting words and watering down the text and taking it backwards," said Bjarne Pedersen of Consumers International.
Remi Parmentier, political director of Greenpeace, said the chances were slim that the summit would give environmental deals more clout in the face of the World Trade Organisation.
Rich countries gave about $54 billion in development aid in 2001 but paid more than $350 billion to their own farmers - or as one World Bank official noted: "The average cow is supported by three times the level of income of a poor person in Africa".
Green group Friends of Earth called the United States the "single biggest block on progress at the Earth Summit".
But it also took aim at the European Union for a lack of leadership on trade, as well as on promoting clean energy in the face of the oil lobby and making multinationals more accountable under strict Western laws for their actions in the Third World.
"On many key issues, the EU is part of the problem rather than the solution," the group said.
The EU's Development Commission
