Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060192/06019932.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 42

RIO: SUMMIT TO SAVE THE EARTH

Rich vs. Poor


North and South will meet in Rio to confront the planet's most
pressing ills. The event could change the world -- or be a
disaster of global proportions.

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT -- Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York,
Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Anita Pratap/New Delhi


    The lineup of world leaders will include Prime Minister
John Major, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Prime Minister Kiichi
Miyazawa and, now that he has finally made up his mind to go,
President George Bush. The Dalai Lama will join a delegation of
clerics, artists and green-minded parliamentarians. Hundreds of
native leaders, from American Indians to Malaysian tribesmen,
will represent the interests of the world's indigenous peoples.
Tens of thousands of diplomats, scientists, ecologists,
theorists, feminists, journalists, tourists and assorted
hangers-on are expected to gather in dozens of auditoriums and
outdoor sites for nearly 400 official and unofficial events,
among them an environmental technology fair, a scientific
symposium and a meeting of mayors. Peter Max's art will appear
on special postage stamps. A Robert Rauschenberg poster will be
slapped up on walls. Placido Domingo will headline a
star-studded musical tribute to the planet. And a full-size
replica of a 9th century Viking ship will sail in from Norway
carrying messages of goodwill from children all over the world.

    If size and ambition were the measures of success, the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio
de Janeiro would take all the prizes. The so-called Earth
Summit, more than two years in the making, will be the largest
and most complex conference ever held -- bigger than the
momentous meetings at Versailles, Yalta and Potsdam.

    Those summits carved up empires, drew new borders and
settled world wars. The agenda for the Earth Summit is more far
reaching: it sets out to confront not only the world's most
pressing environmental problems -- from global warming to
deforestation -- but poverty and underdevelopment as well. A
five-week preparatory meeting in New York City that ended last
month produced 24 million pages of documents. "It's a Herculean
task," admits Maurice Strong, the former Canadian oil executive
who organized and serves as secretary-general for the giant
get-together.

    But with one week to go before the opening ceremonies, the
outlook for the Rio conference is far from certain. It is still
possible that the Earth Summit will be one of those landmark
events that change the course of history, recasting the
relationship of the nations of the world not only to one another
but also to their environment. Or it could end up to be a
diplomatic disaster of global proportions, driving the wedge
deeper between the industrial countries and developing countries
and thus setting back the cause of environmentalism.

    The world has changed dramatically since the first Earth
Summit, held 20 years ago in Stockholm (and also chaired by the
indefatigable Strong). That event, which launched thousands of
grass-roots conservation groups around the world and spawned
environmental agencies and ministries in more than 115 nations,
was held in the shadow of the cold war, when the planet was
divided into rival East and West blocs and preoccupied with the
perils of the nuclear arms race. With the collapse of the East
bloc and the thawing of the cold war, a fundamental shift in the
global axis of power has occurred. Today the more meaningful
division -- especially on environmental issues -- is not between
East and West but between "North" (Europe, North America and
Japan) and "South" (most of Asia, Africa and Latin America). And
though the immediate threat of nuclear destruction has lifted,
the planet is no less at risk.

    While there has been some environmental prog ress in
individual countries, the state of the world has mostly gone
downhill. Air pollution, a major issue in Stockholm, has grown
significantly worse in most cities. Even more alarming, it is
now overshadowed by broad atmospheric changes, such as ozone
depletion and the buildup of greenhouse gases. According to the
Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, one of the hundreds of
environmental pressure groups advising the Earth Summit
negotiators, the world has lost 200 million hectares (500
million acres) of trees since 1972, an area roughly one-third
the size of the continental U.S. The world's farmers, meanwhile,
have lost nearly 500 million tons of topsoil, an amount equal
to the tillable soil coverage of India and France combined.
Lakes, rivers, even whole seas have been turned into sewers and
industrial sumps. And tens of thousands of plant and animal
species that shared the planet with us in 1972 have since
disappeared.

    The idea behind the Earth Summit was that the relaxation
of cold war tensions, combined with the heightened awareness of
these growing ecological crises, offered a rare opportunity to
persuade countries to look beyond their national interests and
agree to some basic changes in the way they treat the
environment. The broad issues are clear: the developed countries
of the North have grown accustomed to life-styles that are
consuming a disproportionate share of natural resources and
generating the bulk of global pollution. Many of the developing
countries of the South, for their part, are consuming
irreplaceable global resources -- eating the world's seed corn,
as it were -- to provide for their exploding populations. And
both groups have as an object lesson the now bankrupt countries
of the East bloc, whose singularly inefficient path to
industrialization has produced some of the worst environmental
disasters the world has ever seen.

    The solution -- at least in broad outline -- is also
fairly clear. The nations of the world must abandon those
practices that are self-destructive in favor of what
environmentalists like to call "sustainable development." A
sustainable society is one that manages its economic growth in
such a way as to do no irreparable damage to its environment.
By balancing economic requirements with ecological concerns, it
satisfies the needs of its people without jeopardizing the
prospects of future generations.

    A major obstacle to sustainable development in many
countries is a social structure that gives most of the nation's
wealth to a tiny minority of its people. "A person who is
worrying about his next meal is not going to listen to lectures
on protecting the environment," says R.K. Pachauri, director of
New Delhi's Tata Energy Research Institute. What to Northern
eyes seems like some of the worst environmental outrages --
felling rain forests to make charcoal for sale as cooking fuel,
for example -- are often committed by people who have no other
form of income. Yet if the barriers that keep those people poor
have withstood wars of liberation and social revolutions, what
are the chances that they will fall in the name of
environmentalism?

    The disparities that mark individual countries are
mirrored in the planet as a whole. Most of its wealth is
concentrated in the North. "The reality is that there are many
worlds on this planet," says Chee Yokling, a Malaysian
representative of Friends of the Earth, "rich worlds and poor
worlds." From the South's point of view, it is the rich worlds'
profligate consumption patterns -- their big cars, refrigerators
and climate-controlled shopping malls -- that are the problem.
"You can't have an environmentally healthy planet in a world
that is socially unjust," says Brazilian President Fernando
Collor de Mello. Counters a U.S. representative to a presummit
negotiating session: "They are trying to lay a collective guilt
trip on us because we try to give our people a higher standard
of living."

    It comes down to a matter of cash. The North has it. The
South needs it. And the changes that must be made to achieve
sustainable development will not occur unless some of that
wealth finds its way from North to South. So far, the industrial
nations have held pretty tightly to their purse strings. In
March the U.S. did pledge $75 million to help poor countries
find ways to reduce the production of gases that may cause
global warming; and at the presummit negotiations, there were
hints from developed nations that as much as $6 billion in debt
relief and other financial guarantees might be forthcoming at
the Rio conference itself. But that is a pittance compared with
the $125 billion that Strong has said the developed nations will
need to contribute annually to protect natural resources and
clean up pollution. (The developing countries, he says, would
have to put up an additional $500 billion a year.) To put that
in context, the annual U.S. defense budget is $290 billion. "The
bottom line is money," says Kamal Nath, India's Minister of
Environment and Forests. "If the West does not give funds, the
Earth Summit will die a natural death."

    The tensions between North and South, and the financial
conflicts that underlie them, run through every issue before the
Rio negotiators -- even to the question of whether those are the
proper issues to be discussing. Among the major disagreements:


    WHO TURNED UP THE HEAT?

    The fact that this past winter in the northern hemisphere
was one of the warmest in history may be a coincidence. But
most scientists agree that all the smoke and fumes and exhaust
that humans generate will eventually alter the earth's climate.
Those changes could be modest. Or they could trigger coastal
flooding, interior droughts, mass exoduses and pockets of
starvation. What irks some developing nations -- and in
particular Brazil -- is that many people who worry about global
warming point their fingers at the release of carbon dioxide
from the burning of rain forests. The bigger threats are the CO2
and other greenhouse gases produced in the industrial countries
by the burning of fossil fuels. In per capita terms, individuals
in the North generate nearly 10 times as much CO2 from energy
use as their counterparts in the South.

    The problem for the long term is that people in developing
countries now want those consumer items that make life in the
industrial world so comfortable as well as environmentally
costly -- those private cars, refrigerators and air
conditioners. If per capita emissions of greenhouse gases in
China and India were to rise to the level of those in France,
for example, emissions worldwide would jump nearly 70% -- making
a deteriorating situation even worse.

    A treaty to prevent climate change was to be the
centerpiece of the Rio summit. However, poor countries didn't
see why their plans for development should suffer in order to
rectify a problem they did not create. Some rich nations did not
want to sign on to anything that would threaten their
life-styles or increase the cost of doing business. Trying to
spur agreement, the European Community proposed cutting CO2
emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 -- a relatively modest
reduction. But the U.S. steadfastly refused to consider any such
rigid deadlines. Skeptical about the evidence that global
warming will occur, the Bush Administration was concerned that
an arbitrary reduction in the output of CO2 would mean a decline
in industrial production and a loss of jobs -- a particularly
unappealing prospect in an election year.

    The climate-change talks had just about reached an impasse
when committee chairman Jean Ripert of France took it upon
himself to draw up a compromise text liberally sprinkled with
what he calls "constructive ambiguities." It requires nations
to roll back greenhouse-gas emissions to "earlier levels" by the
end of the decade and report periodically on their progress,
but the target of reaching 1990 levels becomes merely a
voluntary goal. That seemed to do the trick. Despite loud
protests by environmentalists that the agreement was too weak,
it was adopted two weeks ago and sent on for signature at Rio.


    WHO'S POISONING THE OCEANS?

    Anyone who has been near the seashore lately -- or
listened to Jacques-Yves Cousteau on TV -- knows that the oceans
are a mess, littered with plastic and tar balls and rapidly
losing fish. But the garbage dumps, the oil spills, the sewage
discharges, the drift nets and factory ships are only the most
visible problems. The real threats to the oceans, accounting for
70% to 80% of all maritime pollution, are the sediment and
contaminants that flow into the seas from land-based sources --
topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides and all manner of industrial
wastes. Coral is particularly sensitive to sediment, and the
reefs that fringe Asia, Australia and the Caribbean -- and
provide a home to many of the world's fish species -- are
already starting to die.

    Every country contributes to the situation roughly in
proportion to its size, although countries that are leveling
their forests are making the runoff problem especially bad. Some
ocean advocates called for a new global treaty that would deal
specifically with land-based pollution. The U.S., on the other
hand, favored strengthening existing international agreements
to control this pollution, particularly at the national and
regional levels. In the end, negotiators adopted the U.S.
approach, agreeing that countries should commit themselves to
cleaning up the seas but that it was premature to consider
drafting a formal global treaty.


    WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE?

    Except for finances, no issue has divided North and South
more sharply than the question of what to do about the world's
remaining virgin forests. At the heart of the debate are the
tropical rain forests -- and a fundamental difference in how
each side sees them. To industrial countries they are a treasure
trove of biodiversity and greenhouse-gas "sinks" that absorb CO2
and thus help keep global warming in check. To developing
nations the forests are resources ripe for exploitation:
potential farmland, a free source of fuel and a storehouse of
exotic kinds of wood that command high prices overseas.

    The Bush Administration had hoped to make deforestation a
showcase issue going into Rio. The presummit discussions opened
with a U.S.-inspired proposal for an outright ban on logging in
tropical forests. But the developing countries retaliated by
demanding that the language cover temperate and boreal
(northern) forests as well. The move was clearly aimed at the
U.S., which has strenuously resisted any scrutiny of the logging
practices in publicly owned ancient forests in the Pacific
Northwest.

    At a separate conference in Kuala Lumpur earlier this
month, Malaysia's feisty Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad
reiterated the developing world's hard line on the issue. If the
industrial nations think the rain forests are so important for
biodiversity and CO2 storage, says Mahathir, why don't the rich,
CO2-creating countries pay for the service of preserving those
forests, instead of hectoring the poor countries not to utilize
one of their few natural resources? Mahathir, of course, is not
exactly a disinterested party; his country has been charged with
rampant overlogging in peninsular Malaysia and Borneo.

    The lines have been so sharply drawn on all the
forest-protection of issues that what was originally intended
to be a legally binding forestry convention was watered down
months ago to a nonbinding "statement of principles" that will
probably be adopted at Rio. Whether a full-fledged treaty will
be negotiated later is still uncertain.


    WHO NEEDS THESE SPECIES?

    Not since the dinosaurs were killed off, say biologists,
has the world experienced an extinction "spasm" like the
man-made one that will wipe out 10% to 20% of the earth's
estimated 10 million species of plants and animals by the year
2020. Since at least 50% of those species live in tropical rain
forests, past efforts to save them have run into the usual lines
of resistance from governments in the South, which resent any
kind of meddling from the North. What makes the losses so
unacceptable is that they are irreversible; once a species
becomes extinct, it is gone forever. After years of negotiation,
an international agreement to conserve imperiled species and
ecosystems has finally been reached.

    Much of the debate in presummit meetings centered on the
issue of who owns and controls the genetic information stored
in those species. Traditionally, the benefits that come from
genetic materials -- seeds, specimens or drugs derived from
plants and animals -- go to whoever finds a way to exploit them.
Vanilla, for example, was a biological resource found only in
Central America. It later became an important cash crop in
Madagascar. Now a U.S. biotech company has developed a process
to clone the vanilla flavor in a cell culture. If the firm sells
the bioengineered version for less than natural vanilla and
takes some of the market share, who will compensate the
Madagascar farmers? Or the Central American Indians from whose
lands the genetic material originated?

    Earlier this year it was hoped that the Earth Summit
treaty would include a provision making genetic materials of all
kinds the sovereign resource of the originating country. Nations
would have control over who had access to their genetic
resources, and if someone else found a way to make money from
them, the originating country would collect royalties on each
sale.

    The effect of such a treaty could be striking. Rather than
viewing concern about endangered species as a barrier that the
industrial world is placing in the way of progress, the
developing nations might see biodiversity as a resource that,
if properly inventoried and managed, could generate real income.
The idea, says Thomas Lovejoy, a tropical ecologist at the
Smithsonian Institution, is "to start thinking about the problem
as a joint venture in which both sides have property rights."

    But disagreements arose in the late rounds of negotiation
that weakened the final text of the treaty. The agreement now
states that the North must give the South money and technology
to preserve biodiversity and that communities and indigenous
peoples should have a financial stake in conserving their native
plants and animals. However, the treaty sets out no formula or
mechanism for payments for the use of genetic materials.

    There are scores of other issues -- large and small --
buried in the drafts of two primary Earth Summit texts: a
five-page "declaration" and a 600-plus-page "blueprint for
action" called Agenda 21. The shorter statement, originally
called the Earth Charter, was supposed to be a soaring preamble,
along the lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The
longer agenda was supposed to specify the problems that the
world will face well into the 21st century and how to pay for
their solution.

    Both documents will be adopted at Rio, but neither bears
much resemblance to the original conception. After weeks of
debate, the Earth Charter was abandoned and replaced by a
woodenly written declaration filled with the kind of pious
promises ("eradicating poverty," "eliminat[ing] unsustainable
patterns of production and consumption") that world leaders
often make but never keep. In what is perhaps the worst example
of bureaucratic obfuscation, the text at one point endorses the
promotion of "appropriate demographic policies" -- the nearest
negotiators could come to confronting the explosive issue of
population control.

    Agenda 21 became the main forum for North-South wrangling
on every topic imaginable, including the spread of deserts,
disposal of toxic wastes and protection of women's rights. In
the end, the conferees were able to agree that some of these
problems do need to be solved. What they still have not agreed
on is the means to solve them. To bring about meaningful change
in most of these areas would require overhauling the way the
world does business -- from the laws that control international
trade to the financial institutions that direct the ebb and flow
of capital. That is a task that the negotiators have barely
even begun.

    Much of the debate has centered on technology, which both
sides seem to agree is crucial. The Japanese have already made
it a national goal to develop the next generation of
environmentally friendly machines and industrial processes --
seeing this as a way that developed countries can strengthen
their position in the world economy. The developing nations,
still saddled with old, inefficient production techniques,
insist that they will never be able to curb pollution without
preferential access to new processes and equipment. Some experts
fear that both sides have unrealistic expectations of
technology, as if it were a magic carpet that would allow
primitive societies to skip the Industrial Revolution and go
straight to the environmentally friendly 21st century. But after
weeks of debate, negotiators were not able to agree on whether
what they wanted was technology "transfer" or technology
"cooperation," never mind how to achieve them.

    Nor were they able to settle how Agenda 21 would be paid
for. Any aid would logically be administered by the Global
Environmental Facility, a $1.3 billion fund that is run jointly
by the World Bank, the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N.
Development Program. Environmentalists are suspicious of the GEF
because the World Bank, the lending institution through which
most international aid has been funneled in the past, has a
history of investing primarily in large, ecologically damaging
capital projects such as jungle highways and hydroelectric dams.
Developing countries resent the GEF because it is effectively
controlled by the World Bank, which in turn is dominated by the
industrialized countries. They also complain that it targets
problems that the developed world cares about, such as global
warming and ozone depletion, rather than issues important to the
developing world, including fresh-water supplies and the spread
of deserts.

    The developing nations want a separate "Green Fund" that
they could help manage and control. The donor nations,
suspicious of corruption in the governments of the South, have
so far refused to budge. And since the North controls the money,
its position is likely to prevail. "That's what gets my goat,"
says Anil Agarwal, director of the Center for Science and
Environment in New Delhi. "They are the environmental crooks,
and they have all the levers of power."

    Agarwal's comments reflect a new feistiness among
developing countries on environmental matters. A coalition of
them, called the Group of 77, has put up a remarkably united
front in the Earth Summit talks. Led by Indians and Pakistanis,
whose language skills and flair for bureaucratic nitpicking
serve them well in parliamentary maneuverings, the G-77 nations
have effectively resisted what they see as an effort to make
them pay for the industrial world's environmental sins. "We may
not have been able to get what we want," says India's Pachauri.
"But we can draw satisfaction from the fact that we have
prevented the West from ramming inequitable and unfair
conventions down our throats."

    The industrial nations have shown no such solidarity.
European nations, pressured by powerful green movements of their
own, sound quite progressive on environmental issues, but they
are still not very good at enforcing their antipollution laws.
Japan, stung by its image as an ecological outlaw for its
whaling practices and its insatiable appetite for raw wood,
seems determined to present itself in these talks as an
environmental world leader.

    The countries of the former East bloc have been largely
sidelined. Not only are they torn by civil strife, but they are
also confronted with hundreds of desperate environmental crises,
ranging from an outbreak of malignant tumors in the heavily
contaminated Silesia region of southwest Poland to a rash of
lung, skin and eye disorders among Bulgarian children who live
near chemical plants on the Danube River. Eastern Europe's
governments, barely able to keep their economies moving, have
little money to clean up pollution. In presummit negotiations
the main role of what used to be called the second world was to
insist that any funds for the developing nations be matched with
set-asides for the "economies in transition."

    The U.S. -- the world's richest nation and its single
biggest polluter -- has stood in the way of prog ress on many
of the most closely watched summit issues. While senior
officials held briefings painting the Bush Administration as
pro-environment, U.S. delegates backed the status quo on one
topic after another, insisting over and over that "the American
life-style is not up for negotiation."

    Hopes for a compromise lifted briefly in late March when
the head of the American delegation, Assistant Secretary of
State Curtis Bohlen, announced that the U.S. had reversed itself
and accepted the idea that "new and additional financial
resources" would be needed to pay for environmental action in
poor countries. But Bohlen would not say how much the U.S. might
be willing to pledge.

    In the end, negotiators despaired of settling the funding
questions in advance and agreed to reopen the issue in Rio. Some
observers think the Group of 77 may have made a tactical blunder
by pushing so hard for financial and technical aid. Sir Crispin
Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the U.N., has called it
a "diplomatic mistake of the highest magnitude." Others
criticize the Earth Summit organizers, who by putting so many
environmental problems on the negotiating table may have
inadvertently ensured that none of them get solved.

    By linking environmentalism and development, the conferees
have brought to the surface a fundamental conflict in the way
man and nature measure progress -- a conflict between economics
and ecology. To an economist, weighing things like savings,
investments and growth, ecological concerns are secondary
considerations to be factored into the larger econometric model.
Ecologists studying the complex relationships of living things
to their environment know from experience that treating nature
like a limitless resource leads, eventually, to irreversible
collapse.

    In the negotiations leading up to the Earth Summit,
individual nations have acted like ecologists on external
matters and economists on their own internal affairs. This is,
perhaps, to be expected. Making sacrifices for the good of the
planet requires negotiating away some measure of national
sovereignty, something no country does with grace.

    That is not likely to change when those 100 or so heads of
state meet in Rio next week. If the world's environmental
problems did not get solved in two years of preparatory
negotiations, they can hardly be settled in 10 days dominated
by banquets, receptions and photo opportunities. But it is not
too late to salvage something of great value from the Earth
Summit. If the leaders who go there -- and the people watching
them from around the world -- can be convinced that the crisis
facing the planet is serious enough to demand a new alliance
between North and South, then there is hope that what did not
get accomplished on the road to Rio may at least get started on
the way home.