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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 10, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Cuba to Earth Summit

"To preserve nature, we must transform human relations"

[The Earth Summit, which attracted 3,000 delegates from around the world to the United Nations in New York, ended June 27 in deep frustration. Delegates from developing countries in particular were reported angry at the imperialists' broken promises.

When the last Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, most of the countries that have grown rich exploiting colonies agreed to double their contributions to sustainable development in the Third World, as outlined in a 200,000-word program. But since then, such aid has actually declined.

The United States further torpedoed the goals of the conference by refusing to sign an international treaty limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

We publish here the Cuban translation of the speech of Cuba's delegate to the conference, Ricardo Alarcon.]

Mr. President,

Five years after the Rio Summit, the problems that had then been promised to be solved are now more severe.

That hope disappeared along with millions of hectares of destroyed forests and thousands of annihilated animal and plant species, dissolved in the polluted seas and rivers and in the unbreathable atmosphere, buried in the barren soils and in the deserts.

Carbon dioxide emissions have increased in some industrial countries and it is foreseen that very few will be able to stabilize their emissions of greenhouse-effect fumes down to the levels of 1990 by the year 2000.

If Rio seemed to be the perilously late awakening of the world's conscience, what has come about thereafter only shows how far the insensible selfishness of a system that sacrifices everything to the luxury of a few can go.

The poor multiply and are poorer; and among them women and children grow in number. Three hundred fifty-eight people have assets greater than the combined annual income of countries inhabited by 2.5 billion people-almost 45 percent of the world's population.

Very few are the developed countries that have contributed the meager 0.7 percent of their annual GDP as "official assistance for development," which continues to decrease and today has reached its lowest level since 1983.

In addition, the Third World's service of the foreign debt is every year more than three times as much as that "assistance." Thus, and through unequal trade and capital drain, it is the poor countries who finance the opulence and squandering of others.

Things have not changed much. It is the old colonialism that remains, unable to be concealed by the deceiving rhetoric of "globalization." To force the world to submit remains its true essence. International cooperation is an empty phrase. All over, imperialism breaks sovereignties apart and crushes rights.

How to expect fair treatment for the other states if the most powerful one insults this Organization and all its members? The one who receives the greatest benefit as host country of the United Nations is trying not to pay what it owes the Organization and to force others to assume part of its quota and impose inadmissible conditions upon it. Since when is the UN owned by its main debtor?

For those who accumulated their wealth through the exploitation of the Third World it is not a matter of assisting but of returning part of what they plundered; as well as they have the obligation to pay their ecological debt because their irrational consuming and wasting patterns are ultimately responsible for the deterioration of the environment.

It is up to them to radically change those patterns instead of expanding them-as they do-to the poor countries' privileged minorities. What they should transfer to underdeveloped countries are environmentally rational technologies in the preferential terms defined at Rio.

Far from compliance with their commitments, what we witness is the oblivion of what was subscribed to five years ago and, even worse, the quest to change it and set for the underdeveloped countries new and arbitrary restrictions that will make sustainable development more arduous.

'Capitalist greed is the principal cause'

Capitalist greed is the principal cause of the unjust world and of the severe damage to nature which is threatening the survival of humankind today. It is absurd to try to cure those evils with the blind worship of market, with more selfishness, with more capitalism.

In order to preserve nature it is essential to completely transform relations among nations and among men. The Earth will live on only if we are capable of conquering justice and solidarity on it.

If for the Third World, sustainable development is a hard goal to reach under the current circumstances, for Cuba it proves even harder. We persist in reaching it amid the economic, political and even biological war unleashed against Cuba by the United States, which attempts against our people's right to life and which is carried out ignoring the resolutions of this Assembly, violating international law and the sovereignty of other nations.

The powerful call on us to give up what we agreed upon at the previous Summit. Instead of urgently putting into practice the Rio Program of Action, they invite us to simply abandon it.

We must reject and denounce that attempt. Hegemonism and pre-eminence cannot prevail over a humanity that has a right to the future and must and will fight to save it.

The powerful must remember that they dwell on the same planet as their victims, and if they insist on destroying it, their children and ours will meet the same fate.

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