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Bali meet on sustainable dev

North-south rift lingers

REZAUL KARIM, from Bali, Indonesia
The two-week talks on sustainable development started off yesterday in Bali, with countries from North and South dividing over who should implement what and when.
Non-governmental organisations characterised the meeting as paying little more than lip service to the governments.
Nearly 6,000 delegates from around the world assembled in the Indonesian tourist resort, Bali, to draft an action plan, known as the chairman's statement that seeks to curb the overexploitation of natural resources.
The Bali meeting is the fourth and last round of talks prior to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) to be held in Johannesburg from August 26 to September 4.
A five-member Bangladesh delegation led by Environment Secretary Sabihuddin Ahmed is
participating in the fourth meeting. The Bangladesh delegates are playing a vital role alongside G-77 countries on different issues. The state minister for environment and forest will attend a high-level segment from June 5 to 7.
Delegates must finish revising the chairman's statement on Friday ahead of talks at the ministerial level. However, some have expressed pessimism about the chance of reaching a solid agreement, citing persistent differences among the participating countries.
"What I am dealing with here are efforts to jettison the time commitments," said Emil Salim, the chairman of the fourth PrepCom on the WSSD, who drafted the statement based on the results of three previous preparatory committee meetings in New York.
Incorporating timetables and targets into the chairman's statement requires greater commitments from governments to implement the action plan.
This has been an unresolved issue throughout the past three rounds of talks. Seen as most opposed to such commitments are the developed countries, especially the United States.
"I told them, here guys, were talking here about getting results in ten years times. We can't have something that's going to be realised in 2040," Emil Salim said. "But putting it under a ten-year timeframe requires resources, commitments and priorities. That's where the tug ofwar lies," he added.
Delegates have agreed on most of the contents of the 38-page draft, but several paragraphs have been in bold -- meaning they require further negotiations before a consensus is reached.
Emil Salim said that it was no longer acceptable that 20 per cent of the world's population advanced in prosperity at the expense of the environment. "That's why we need resources efficiencies. That's why subsidies on agriculture must be abolished," he added.
The PrepCom chairman said that as the chairman of the meeting, he could not interfere in the negotiations, but he lamented the absence of agreements from developing countries.
A senior government official participating in the meeting said the developed countries brought with them hundreds of delegates "to
ensure that they have representatives to every corner of meetings so that the outcomes reflect their interests".
Non-governmental organisations lambasted the negotiations on the chairman's statement as representing the interests of developed countries in the North.
Meanwhile, the developing countries had been unable to resist the pressures from the developed countries resulting in the currentweek chairman's statement.
Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Friends of Earth, Third World Network and several NGOs from different countries in a joint statement said that the chairman's statement lacked action and was designed to reflect the interests of the countries of the north.
"It (chairman's statement) appears more suitable as a core document for a Northern government summit for unsustainable development," the statement added.