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Rio+20 Summit: No agreement on sustainable development

Published Jun 27, 2012 8:58 PM

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, hailed as the largest U.N. conference ever held, ended on June 22 after more than a week of speeches, but with no specific timetables or achievable goals.

Held in Rio de Janeiro 20 years after the first Earth Summit in the same city, the conference, informally called Rio+20, was supposed to tackle the formidable problems of climate change, now an acknowledged fact.

It was attended by more than 45,000 people from around the globe, representing 190 countries. At least 100 heads of state articulated their views on the environment, economic development and the balance of power between the industrialized capitalist states and the so-called developing countries.

But a 49-page document entitled “The Future We Want,” which was released after the summit, did not commit to any concrete solutions.

At the end of the Copenhagen climate-change summit of 2009, African countries walked out to protest the inability of the developed states to take responsibility for global warming and its impact on the continent.

‘Talk shop’ fails to address poverty

This time many nongovernmental organizations and so-called civil society groups condemned the event as another talk shop that would not bring about any tangible improvement in the conditions of poverty and underdevelopment inflicting billions of people around the world.

The two most militaristic imperialist powers, the United States and Britain, did not bother to send their top leaders to address the conference. Barack Obama, who sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was busy trying to assure his reelection. David Cameron, who sent his Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, was submerged in the worsening sovereign debt crisis in Europe that threatens to engulf the continent and other parts of the world in another capitalist downturn, with even graver implications than the one from 2007 to 2009.

When Clegg appeared on a giant screen at the food court outside the gathering, his image was met with hisses and boos — an indication of the anti-Western sentiment at the conference.

Bo Normander, European director of Worldwatch Institute, said, “I want more of the future than this agreement’s long list of platitudes and feeling-good rhetoric.” (Irish Times, June 25)

In regard to the section on the “green economy” included in Chapter 3, Normander noted that “the description is ambiguous, unambitious and immeasurable [and] there are no specific targets or commitments which can bind countries to do something. The EU should not have accepted it.”

The document does not contain any commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, worth an estimated $1 trillion internationally. Justin Kilcullen, director of the Irish charity Trocaire, devoted to working for a just world, pointed out that levying taxes on financial transactions, “which could generate billions in revenue each year to eliminate poverty and tackle climate change,” was not mandated.

Over the last two decades conditions related to the environment and the class divisions between rich and poor have worsened. The Earth Summit of 1992 put forward significant ideas exposing the problems of climate change and biodiversity as well as the need to eradicate poverty and achieve social justice.

Nonetheless, since 1992, global emissions have increased by 48 percent, while the world population has grown by 1.6 billion, with no real plans to provide food, water, shelter, education and economic resources for these people. Over the last several years, more uncertainty has developed due to the multi-trillion-dollar debt crisis, the rise in unemployment and the many NATO and U.S. military interventions in Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Alternative approaches
from Africa & Latin America

However, two speeches, delivered by the presidents of Zimbabwe and Cuba, did shed light on the current crisis as well as show a way forward for the majority of people throughout the world.

President Robert Mugabe of the Republic of Zimbabwe said that the imperialist states are almost in denial about the severity of the current situation. He called for “the complete overhaul of the global economic and financial governance structures so that they are more responsive to the needs of poor states, particularly those that are more vulnerable.”

President Raul Castro Ruz of Cuba observed: “What could have been considered alarmist, today constitutes an irrefutable reality. The inability to transform unsustainable models of production and consumption is threatening the balance and regeneration of natural mechanisms which sustain life forms on the planet.” (Granma International, June 22)

President Castro continued, “The effects cannot be hidden. Species are becoming extinct at a speed one hundred times faster than those indicated in fossil records; more than 5 million hectares of forests are lost every year; and close to 60 percent of ecosystems are degraded.”

The Cuban leader concluded by emphasizing, “The only alternative is to build more just societies; to establish a more equitable international order based on respect for the rights of all; to ensure the sustainable development of nations, especially those of the South; and place advances in science and technology at the service of the salvation of the planet and human dignity.”

Capitalism is unsustainable

It is the world capitalist system that is causing monumental problems throughout the globe. These abuses, involving exploitation and oppression of both human society and the natural environment, which are largely dictated by the developed capitalist states, affect the overwhelming majority of the world’s people, especially those in the developing countries.

The problems of environmental degradation, poverty and hunger will not be overcome without the overthrow of international finance capital and its surrogates. The profitability of capitalism is derived from these very problems that imperialists claim they are committed to alleviating.

Inside the industrialized states, the workers and oppressed must work vigorously to bring about fundamental economic change.