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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2002
Discontent at UN economy summit
"Our world is not for sale!" "Another world
is possible!" "Water for the thirsty! Light for the people! Homes for
the homeless!" The slogans of over 20,000 protesters outside of the World
Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) cut through the rhetoric infesting the
official meetings. Dozens of other protests were held on every continent. The summit, held in August and September in Johannesburg,
South Africa, was supposedly dedicated to fighting poverty and illness and
putting humanity on an environmentally sustainable path of development. But the
protesters understood that the 65,000 delegates from the world's governments had
other agendas. In another of the many protests, women's groups, supported
by trade unionists, successfully demanded an amendment to the summit program's
language, which said that health care services should be "consistent with
national laws and cultural and religious values." The women demanded that
it also be consistent with "human rights and fundamental freedoms."
The U.S., the Vatican and Egypt opposed the women, on the grounds that if human
rights and freedoms are included, the text could be interpreted to include
abortion. With substantial participation from international
activists--and in the face of heavy repression that some activists compared to
the apartheid era--the marchers in Johannesburg were mainly poor South Africans
who attacked both the Summit and the South African government's neoliberal
policies. Nor did they spare the Global Forum, the UN-sanctioned "civil
society alternative forum" dominated by recognized non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). A protester wrote for Indymedia South Africa that the
Global Forum included the ANC (the ruling party) and its allies, the national
council of trade unions and the Communist Party: "People facing water and
electricity cutoffs, evictions, lack of health care, education and land came
together to say that the Global Forum...was a sham in that the very people it
brought together to discuss 'sustainable development' are the ones implementing
the policies that hurt us most. [Marchers] lashed out at...the unsustainability
of capitalism. [The movement asserts] the power of collective, democratic action
in the creation of another world outside of capitalism." The snake oil the capitalists are selling this year is
"stakeholder partnership initiatives"--deals for specific projects,
hatched between corporations, governments, foundations and NGOs. Some groups
like the World Resources Institute fell into the trap, hailing this "new
way of governing the global commons." Others like Friends of the Earth have warned for months
that this is a "privatization of implementation"--that is, private
parties acting in their own interests as a substitute for binding rules on
states and companies. It is also seen as a spur to privatization of essentials
like water. "Hijacked" is the word being used for the summit
by the movements against global capital and the more radical environmental
groups. For the original idea of the 1992 Earth Summit was to view economic
growth in the context of environmental protection, but that has been turned into
opposite: the 2002 meeting subsumed ecology and human development under
capitalist globalization. This result was implicit as soon as the first Earth Summit
succeeded in projecting sustainable development as something thoroughly
capitalistic, even though capitalism by its very nature develops (sustainably or
otherwise) poverty, misery, unemployment--and the revolt against it. A young Black woman from Memphis who attended the Global
Forum told NEWS & LETTERS: "Those people who actually developed the
concept of sustainable development years ago were kept out of the
decision-making process. The words 'sustainable development' have been changed
into dirty words because it's now ruled by the multinational corporations. "I thought I was going to be part of this
history-making process that has been going on all along and I just got invited
to the table to participate. Then the whole process changes and gets taken away
from the people." --Franklin Dmitryev |
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