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‘No conference in history has ever faced the need to take such an important
range of decisions – decisions that will literally determine the fate of
the Earth,’ says Maurice Strong, the secretary-general of the UN Conference
on Environment and Development – the Earth Summit. ‘It’s our best chance,
perhaps our last chance, to save the planet,’ says the head of the UN Environment
Programme, Mostafa Tolba.

What are we to make of such wild rhetoric from men of sober judgment?
The summit could be the biggest meeting of world leaders ever. But it could
also be an immensely damaging letdown. So far, from the leading nations,
only John Major – who may be out of office when the meeting takes place
next June in Rio de Janeiro – and Mikhail Gorbachev – who is arguably already
out of office – have agreed to attend.

The agenda for the Earth Summit covers a vast range of planetary ills:
from spreading deserts to the greenhouse effect, from world poverty to the
fate of the rainforests. At its heart will be the signing of a brief, ‘inspirational’
Earth Charter – an expression of intent – and a longer document to be called
Agenda 21, a blueprint for planetary survival in the 21st century. Also
on the table for signature should be international conventions committing
nations to fight the greenhouse effect and preserve biological diversity.

That is the official version. But in the committee rooms where negotiators
are attempting to thrash out the details of this global pronouncement, the
talk is of a dangerous polarisation between the nations of the rich North
and the poor South.

There are four preconference negotiating meetings, known as PrepComs.
After the third, in Geneva in August, Britain’s Department of the Environment
admitted in a report that progress had been ‘painfully slow’. The meeting
‘closed with virtually all the negotiation still ahead of us’. The crunch
will come at the start of the fourth and final PrepCom, in New York next
March.

Lobbying for the meeting is fierce and the battle lines are drawn. The
North – Europe, North America and Japan – is worried about global issues
such as the greenhouse effect and the destruction of the planet’s last rainforests.
It says: We are all in the same boat and must pull together to protect our
future prosperity.

The South – most of Asia, Africa and South America – dismisses the ‘same
boat’ argument. The North has the prosperity and created the global crisis,
it says. The North is responsible for most of the planet’s pollution and
consumes most of its natural resources. Moreover, the North’s control of
commerce is creating trade imbalances and poverty in the South that force
poor nations to overuse their forests and soils, creating grave local environmental
problems.

The South says that if the North wants help in saving the planet, then
it must pay – by changing the rules of trade, providing more aid and allowing
access to the latest technologies. This approach sounds to the North like
blackmail. Whatever it is, Crispin Tickell, Britain’s former ambassador
to the UN and one of the architects of the conference, says that the polarisation
has become ‘very dangerous’.

Both sides are at fault, Tickell told a conference in London in October.
The governments of the North, and especially the US, will not admit that
‘they are the problem’. And the South has miscalculated by believing that
it can use the summit to extract large amounts of money from the North.
‘It is a diplomatic mistake of the highest magnitude to believe that the
industrial governments are over a barrel,’ he said. ‘Aid simply isn’t going
to happen.’

Part of the problem is that there are really two aspects to the environmental
crisis. On a global scale there are problems exemplified by the greenhouse
effect and the rapid extinction of species. In addition there is a rash
of local crises in different parts of the world, where poor nations are
using up their natural resources in an effort to pull themselves out of
poverty.

Poor African states around the Sahara desert destroy soil and water
resources to grow crops for sale to Europe. Indonesia and Brazil clear forests
to manufacture plywood and graze cattle, in an effort to trigger industrial
growth. In the language of economists, they are using up their natural capital
resources without replacing them with adequate manmade capital. They are
asset-stripping.

While the North’s professed concern is the long-term global crises,
the rich nations have succeeded in painting global problems as largely the
responsibility of the South. For instance, the North has emphasised the
role of tropical deforestation in accelerating the greenhouse effect when,
in reality, logging in the South contributes little to global warming. The
US, in particular, calls for an end to tropical deforestation but refuses
to limit its emissions of greenhouse gases.

It is the emphasis of the Rio organisers on global concerns that lies
behind the polarisation, says Koy Thomson from the International Institute
for Environment and Development in London and a member of the British negotiating
team to the PrepComs. ‘Locally, the governments of the South can see how
they can protect their environment to their own benefit,’ he says. ‘But
when they are asked to contribute to solving global problems, they ask:
what’s in it for us? This was never anticipated.’

The guiding light of the conference organisers is that only by protecting
the environment can long-term ‘sustainable’ development continue. Under
the present North-South tensions this light is being snuffed out.

During the past decade, environmentalists and aid organisations such
as Oxfam have forged alliances under the banner of ‘sustainable development’.
They have undermined the view that development of the poor world and environmental
protection were diametrically opposed.

But the summit rift is pulling these alliances apart. In the North,
national groups of Friends of the Earth lobby in the cause of saving the
planet. But prominent activists from the South such as Martin Khor of Friends
of the Earth Malaysia, whose members have been jailed for opposing rainforest
destruction, have ‘decided to ally with their governments against the North’,
says Thomson.

Khor calls for a ‘deindustrialisation of the North’ as the logical solution
to global perils. And, earlier this year, Anil Agarwal, director of the
Centre for Science and the Environment in India, wrote a vitriolic report
on ‘mathematical jugglery’ at the World Resources Institute. The Washington
DC environment group, he said, was seeking to ‘blame developing countries
for global warming and perpetuate the current global inequality in the use
of the Earth’s environment and its resources’.

Maria-Elena Hurtado, director of the World Development Movement, in
London, says: ‘People in the South wonder whether the North’s version of
planetary salvation requires having 4 billion people perpetually poor in
the South.’

A common view among environmentalists in the North is that, if things
look bad now, think how much worse they could be if the South follows the
rich world’s path to economic development. Thus Greenpeace’s Jeremy Leggett
recently warned that China’s plans to use its coal reserves ‘spell death-by-climate
for millions and disaster for all.’

Hurtado sees the world differently: ‘Environmental destruction in the
Third World is caused by lack of economic development.’ Her manifesto for
saving the planet puts international debt and trade ahead of any overtly
green agenda. Green groups in the North should stop campaigning for a ban
on trade in tropical timber, she says. Instead, they should fight to remove
the onerous tariffs that prevent tropical countries selling finished timber
products such as furniture to the rich world. That way the South would make
more money from every tree, and so would cut fewer down, she says.

The Earth Summit begins to look like a crunch meeting between management
and shop stewards at a company facing bankruptcy. The bosses of Earth Inc,
from their air-conditioned offices in Washington and Geneva, ask for cooperation
and a sense of common purpose to pull the company round. Shop stewards from
the South see their members being asked to make all the sacrifices and lay
out their terms for cooperation.

Those terms are simple: cash and technology, on the table, before the
serious talking begins. When the final PrepCom meeting begins in New York,
the first item on the agenda – and by far the most important – will be how
to pay for saving the planet. A motion from the group known as G77 – an
alliance of governments from Africa, Asia and South America – calls for
‘mandatory contributions’ from developed countries which Southern nations
can spend as they see fit.

The last PrepCom asked the conference secretariat to prepare for New
York estimates of the cost of implementing the still uncertain proposals
in Agenda 21. Thomson estimates that ‘to build environmental concerns into
sustainable development programmes will mean a doubling of aid. To finance
environmental recovery will require a tripling of aid’.

Amid all the politicking, few delegations are talking about what needs
to be done – or how. Take the spreading of the world’s deserts. It was seen
as one of the most pressing environmental issues of the 1970s. Countering
it was the first great project of the UN Environment Programme. That project
abjectly failed. Yet, despite protests from African nations, the PrepComs
for Rio have discussed neither why it failed, nor what to do next.

Debate about the oceans and the collapse of world fisheries has been
swamped by arguments over the moratorium on whaling and whether the UN should
take charge of Antarctica. ‘Little of substance was accomplished,’ according
to the British government report. The future of the world’s forests has
been discussed but, says Thomson, ‘nobody has agreed what the objectives
of a forestry policy should be, nor how it should differ from existing strategies
under the UN Tropical Forestry Action Plan’. In any case, the issue of forestry
is increasingly complicated by discussions about the greenhouse effect.
The rich nations back the ideas of oil companies such as Shell, which want
to plant forests in the tropics to soak up the carbon dioxide emitted from
power stations and car exhausts in the North.

One thing that no government appears to doubt is that Northern technology
can save the world. The transfer of technical know-how from North to South
ranks beside cash transfer on the South’s shopping list for Rio. It is in
danger of being seen as an instant solution to poverty in the poor world.

Tolba told a conference on technology transfer at Chatham House in London
in September: ‘If developing countries use obsolete, inefficient production
techniques, then our destruction is ensured. The key issue is the affordability
of new technologies to poor countries.’ Many environmentalists hope that
the poor world can leapfrog the dirty, wasteful stage of economic development
experienced by the rich world and move straight to an environment-friendly
21st century.

But neither development experts nor industrialists believe in this fairy-godmother
approach to technology. John Coleman of ICI told the Chatham House conference:
‘Technology transfer is a social, not an industrial issue. It is not about
handing over blueprints, it is about ensuring they will work.’ Sandjit Varadarajan
of the Indian Vaccines Corporation added: ‘We need to install technology
slowly, in stages, and it should have some link to the local community,
using some local resource or local knowledge.’

The idea that the keys to a sustainable future are locked up behind
a wall of patents in the laboratories of Northern companies is a dangerous
myth, according to Fraser Morrison of the management consultants Touche
Ross. Morrison authored a report for the British government’s Rio negotiators
on the role of technology transfer in fighting the greenhouse effect. In
it, he says: ‘Access to the required technologies is more a perceived than
a real barrier. Most relevant technologies are in the public domain and
easy to implement . . . There is no reason for any country to postpone cost-effective
opportunities to limit greenhouse gas emissions.’ Training, management and
maintenance, moreover, are often more important factors than ‘hard’ technology.

For many in the sustainable development fraternity, the notion of bolting
‘green’ technology onto existing development programmes is a recipe for
disaster, whoever pays for it. Joy Hyvarinen of Greenpeace says: ‘In a terrible
way, delegations are tacitly approving the business-as-usual approach that
has taken humanity into an unprecedented crisis.’ That criticism applies
just as much to the South, with its demands for instant industrialisation.

Whether or not the bosses and workers at Earth Inc come up with a deal
this summer, they will get nowhere until they figure out how to put the
business on a sustainable footing. Exploiting the poor and asset-stripping
the planet are not solutions.