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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (150320)	8/25/2002 11:15:06 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1584953

World Summit Promises Action By RAVI NESSMAN .c The Associated Press JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Aug. 25) - Government officials, environmental activists and business leaders promised Sunday the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development will be about action - not just words - to save the environment and combat poverty. But some activists fear the world's wealthiest nations could sabotage any meaningful attempt to build on agreements adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. ``It's important for us that the vision that was captured at Rio is not eroded,'' said Goh Chien Yen, an official with the Third World Network. The 10-day summit, which starts Monday, hopes to halve the more than 1 billion people without access to clean water and the more than 2 billion without proper sanitation. It aims to develop specific plans for expanding the poor's access to electricity and health care, to reverse the degradation of agricultural land and to protect the global environment. ``There is broad agreement that another summit full of words followed by no concrete action would be intolerable,'' said Hans Christian Schmidt, the environment minister in Denmark, which will be leading the European Union delegation to the summit. But many environmental activists were disheartened that President Bush was not among the more than 100 world leaders scheduled to attend. They also blamed much of the difficulty in reaching agreement on the United States' resistance to setting specific targets and its demands that poor nations show good governance before receiving financial aid. ``(The United States) can be a catalyst for positive action or a constraint on international cooperation,'' said Achim Steiner, director general of The World Conservation Union, or IUCN. The EU has also been criticized for refusing to drop subsidies that protect domestic industries and agriculture, an issue that infuriates developing nations struggling to get access to European markets. Negotiators met in special pre-summit sessions Saturday and Sunday to try to resolve some of the contentious issues. U.S. and European officials said they were optimistic a deal could be reached. ``I sense a mood of people wanting to finish the text, come together and find an agreement early,'' said John Turner, a U.S. assistant secretary of state. Many activists have lamented an ``implementation gap'' between the commitments made at the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992 and the governments' inaction to achieve those environmental and development goals. There have been several important environmental agreements signed since the Earth Summit, but the world has utterly ignored its responsibilities to its poor, said Christopher Flavin, president of the World Watch Institute, an environmental advocacy group. ``While there has been enormous economic growth ... the number of people living in poverty has hardly changed at all,'' he said. The divide between the wealthy and the poor was brought into stark relief by the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States, said Jan Pronk, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's liaison to the summit. He said that ostracizing the poor will only breed more resentment toward the West. ``We have to provide a safe place for every person, in the future, on this Earth. A safe place, safe home, safe job,'' he said. Thousands of activists planned demonstrations demanding action toward those goals. South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said Sunday that orderly, authorized protests would be welcomed, but illegal demonstrations would not be tolerated. ``The summit is not a summit for anarchy ... I hope nobody is coming here to test the law,'' she said. Despite the lack of strong action in the past decade, the Rio conference was vitally important because it changed the world's attitude to the environment, said Nitin Desai, secretary-general of the summit. This conference must now turn that into concrete commitments to tackle poverty and protect the planet, Desai said. ``This is a summit that will really define whether we can change the way we act and not just the way we think,'' he said. 08/25/02 16:31 EDT Copyright 2002 The Associated Press.