People's Democracy

Johannesburg Summit—Corporate Governance For Sustainable Trade

Amit Sen Gupta

MORE than 100 heads of states and 15000 delegates representing the governments, private sector, and non-governmental organisations participated in the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), from August 26 to September 4, in the South African city of Johannesburg.

Ten years ago, in 1992, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil had hosted the Conference on Environment and Development. The Rio conference may well be remembered in posterity for putting the concept of "sustainable development" on the global agenda. It wasn’t as if the concept was coined in Rio. It would be difficult to claim that the Rio conference defined in all its complexities what lay behind the two words. But for a large number of people, Rio symbolises sustainable development. The conference in Rio generated an expectation that global resources would be used more prudently in the future. In retrospect, we may say that such expectations were naïve to start with, but Rio was all about hope for a better world.

This perhaps is the key difference between Rio and the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which concluded in Johannesburg on September 4. If Rio was about hope, Johannesburg is all about cynicism. The defining emotions that Johannesburg conjures are cynicism and surrender to corporate control of global resources. It is not as if corporate interests were not present in Rio. But they were present in much larger numbers in Johannesburg, more visible, and much more aggressive.

FROM RIO TO

JOHANNESBURG

The journey from Rio to Johannesburg has been long and tortuous. In these ten years the situation has deteriorated appreciably across the globe. There has been a secular decline in precisely the areas in which targets were sought to be set at Rio, both as regards environment and as regards development. The world is a less healthy place to live in than it was ten years back. Forests have dwindled further, greenhouse gas emissions that promote global warming have increased. Water resources have become scarcer and more polluted.

At the same time absolute poverty has increased and so have disparities within nations and between nations. The rich-poor divide has seldom been as stark as it is today. Resource flows to the poorest countries have actually reversed, and debt servicing has resulted in negative flows to rich countries from poor developing countries. The WTO agreement that has led to strengthening of Patent protection has in fact reversed the flow of technology to less developed corners of the globe.

Much of what has been lost in the last decade has been sacrificed at the altar of globalisation. Trade liberalisation and neo-liberal economic policies have gnawed into the entrails of national sovereignty. Corporates and finance capital wield greater power than sovereign governments, hitting at the very basis of democratic governance. The diabolic notion of "coherence"—an euphemism for the three institutions of globalisation, the IMF, World Bank and WTO working in tandem—has provided untrammeled opportunities to global capital under the leadership of US imperialism.

DENYING

REALITY

The very notion of sustainable development was premised on the notion of common but differentiated responsibilities. It was recognised that it is the developed countries which are responsible for putting the maximum stress on the resources of the globe and hence have the major responsibility in remedying the situation. To quote and oft cited example, an average American is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emission as 19 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 49 Sri Lankans, 107 Bangladeshis, 134 Bhutanese, and 269 Nepalis. Clearly the crass consumerist culture which typifies societies under capitalism and which, arguably, allows capitalism to thrive, is today responsible for putting pressures on global resources that cannot be sustained over a long period of time. Capitalism has responded to this in two ways—both of which do not even touch the basic problem. It has sought to pass on the blame to the impoverished nations of the world by claiming that rising populations in the global South is responsible for making this planet resource poor. This is clearly a ridiculous attempt to deny reality. If this logic is to be true, for India to match the consumption load of the US its population would have to be 20 times and not just 2 ½ times that of the US. The other ploy has been to off-load environmentally degrading activities on to developing countries. By this capitalist nations have sought to silence domestic critics. Japanese consumption, for instance, was responsible for up to 70 per cent of timber logged—most of it illegally -- in the Philippines from the fifties to the nineties.

What global capitalism is not prepared to accept is the fact that unsustainable lifestyles of the developed global North has brought the planet to the brink of a disaster. Instead President George W Bush Sr responded to the Rio Summit of 1992 by saying "America’s lifestyle is not up for negotiation." If that was the case in 1992, the situation is far worse in 2002. The Johannesburg Summit may well be classified as an attempt to redefine sustainable development as sustainable free trade!

US

INTRANSIGENCE

The US has been the most consistent barrier to an advancement of the sustainable development agenda since the Rio summit. Its intransigence culminated in its refusal to be a part of the Kyoto Climate Change protocol about a year back. The Kyoto protocol, among other things, required countries to set targets for greenhouse gas emissions. The US, concerned about the impact it would have on its domestic industry, withdraw citing the pathetic plea that it did not believe in targets! In the run up to the Johannesburg summit the US continued to thumb its nose at the rest of the world, and made it clear well in advance that the US president would not attend the summit. But perish the thought if you think that this means less US involvement in the proceedings at Johannesburg. The mailed fist and the velvet claws of US imperialism are both clearly being felt at the Summit.

CORPORATE

DOMINANCE

The US has chosen to push through a three point agenda. First, obstruct and frustrate attempts at implementing the commitments made in Rio ten years back. Second, convert sustainable development to sustainable free trade by insisting that the two are synonymous! And, three, promote the notion that sustainable development will be facilitated by partnerships with the private sector. Such partnerships are being touted in the five identified "WEHAB" areas -- water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. This move has the potential to snowball into a big opportunity for corporates to become crucial players in critical areas of human needs and enterprise. Conversely it has the potential to reduce the role of both the UN as well as national governments in these areas.

The importance that corporates have assumed in the Johannesburg process is clear from the following excerpt from the draft declaration: "We recognise that the process of globalisation is accompanied by the emergence of leading private sector corporations which have a responsibility to contribute to the evolution of equitable and sustainable communities and societies, even as they pursue their legitimate activities."

All in all, the Johannesburg summit concluded with a charade played out to legitimise corporate governance for sustainable trade. Small wonder that media reports from the summit focused less on the final declaration and more on the public snub that Tony Blair received from Robert Mugabe at the summit!