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World Summit opens with call to action
( 2002-08-27 09:51 ) (7 )

Two delegates to the World Summit on Sustainable Development walk in front of a giant globe in Sandton Square, adjacent to the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, Monday Aug. 26, 2002. [AP]

Aiming for its largest gathering ever, the United Nations opened a global summit Monday to seek ways of protecting nature while boosting living standards for the world's poorest people.

In the opening speech, South African President Thabo Mbeki said the world has an urgent obligation to narrow the divide between the rich and the poor.

"For the first time in human history, human society possesses the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment," he said.

There were a wide range of issues on the agenda - and as many arguments.

Officials from the United States and the European Union were at odds over the usefulness of targets and timetables for issues like sanitation. The EU considers setting specific goals central to the summit's agenda, while U.S. officials say launching projects is more important than documents.

The atmosphere continues to be choked by pollution, a victim of rampant consumerism and the churn of industry as well as desperately poor people draining their lands of water, topsoil and wildlife just to stay alive.

"A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable," Mbeki told delegates at the opening session of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Some 12,600 delegates - including government officials, journalists and members of non-governmental organizations - had already showed up by Monday. About 50,000 people were expected to participate by the time the conference ends, making it the largest in U.N. history.

About 20 miles away, a more colorful, but less organized, gathering of activists called the Global Peoples' Forum struggled to gain momentum.

Delegates there sang and danced, waved placards and meditated, while campaigning for everything from better access to clean water to world peace. One sculptor fashioned penguins from ice with a chain saw, leaving them to melt in the sun to represent global warming.

However, the announced keynote speaker, former South African President Nelson Mandela, did not show up. His office said the organizers never invited him.

The government summit is being held in Sandton, Africa's swankiest commercial district of palatial marble-and-glass towers looming over the squalid township of Alexandra, where many people live in the very hopeless conditions the summit seeks to erase.

The summit, being held in a convention center attached to a shopping mall and business complex, was sealed off by concrete barriers and metal fences. An 8,000-person security force is deployed to help prevent the kind of violence seen in past years' international meetings in Seattle and Genoa, Italy.

In the event's first protests, Zimbabwean and Ethiopian opposition activists peacefully demonstrated Monday against their governments.

Organizers expect the biggest protest to take place Saturday, when about 400 groups plan to march from Alexandra to the conference center.

More than 100 heads of state arrive for the summit next week. Many environmental activists have criticized President Bush for not attending. The official list of participating world leaders was not complete, but among top leaders expected were Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder. Like Bush, Russia's Vladimir Putin is not attending.

By the time the leaders arrive, negotiators hope to have hammered out detailed timetables for tackling problems of energy, biodiversity, food security, clean water and health care.

Unlike the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which opened with two minutes of silence for a "dying" planet, delegates here immediately delved into pragmatic assessments of the world's most pressing needs.

"We must have this sense of urgency that we have no time to lose," summit Secretary-General Nitin Desai said.

Developing nations are trying to extract more aid and greater access to Western markets and technology from the summit. The United States is resisting any new aid targets or timetables, while demanding that aid recipients reduce corruption.

Pre-summit talks disintegrated into fingerpointing, and delegates continued to rewrite the summit's action plans to patch over differences.

Even the EU is at odds with the United States, agreeable to binding targets in some areas such as sanitation. According to the United Nations, 2.2 million people in the developing world die each year from diseases associated with lack of safe water and inadequate sanitation.

"Targets with timetables are at the core of our agenda," said EU official Christine Day. "They alone will make the international community accountable for delivering on its promises."

The U.S. delegation has played down the importance of the summit's final documents, saying they were secondary to the potential to launch "results-oriented" projects.

The United States is seeking business partnerships to augment a $5 billion foreign aid package for some of the summit's key issues. An announcement is expected by the weekend, officials said.

Many environmental activists were disheartened by the United States' continuing resistance to setting firm timetables for action.

"Every time targets come up, the U.S. puts a line through it," said Gordon Shepherd, an official with the World Wildlife Fund.