Address by Mr Desighen Naidoo
Department of Environmental Affairs And Tourism
As a participant, rather than as the host country, South Africa is shaping its approach to the WSSD around the core objective of eradicating poverty and redressing global inequality. We have taken a lot of flak for that in the international arena, even from some close partners, because the original concept of WSSD was Rio plus Ten. It was about the next ten years of environment and development. Our argument is that we need to examine the last ten years, the Rio decade, and see whether we are giving the right emphasis to the opportunity that a world summit on sustainable development presents. Drawing on that analysis it is worth reflecting on various things that have happened in the last ten years.
In the last ten years we’ve witnessed the rise of one of the more powerful economic blocs in human history – the European Union. In the same period we saw the communist bloc re-invented. I’m sure there are varied interpretations of the current political paradigm, but the liberalisation of the Soviet bloc has unleashed, among other things, a new knowledge of poverty, that poverty wasn’t only resident in the classical developing world scenario. It was a reality in parts of the world that were considered developed.
We also saw the rise of a new cycle of northern conservative governments and the demise and then the resurrection of the South East Asian tigers which brought to the fore really important debates around international capital.
On the poverty theme, probably the most important development was the Millennium Summit and along with it the declarations on poverty by various heads of state, including our own. In remarking on what makes the present different to any other time in history, President Mbeki said: ‘Part of naked truth is that the second millennium has provided humanity with the capital, the technology and the human skills to end poverty and underdevelopment in the world.’ This statement has found resonance in the international community because there’s now a public acknowledgement of two factors. One is that poverty is not an issue of the developing world alone, it is a global problem, and the second is that, perhaps for the first time in human history, the collective means exist to address poverty in a sustainable way.
He also said some other interesting things that have shaped the way the South African government is approaching the WSSD. He talked about the billions of people who are expecting a strong, unequivocal message from the Millennium Summit and he said: ‘It must be that we have to jostle with various pagan gods at whose feet we prostrate ourselves, over all of whom tower the gods of inertia – the market and globalisation.’
Those words have helped to shape government’s approach to the different platforms for the WSSD. About six months ago government decided that, while we need to support moving the environmental platform towards sustainable development, to guarantee sustainable development, we need to put more effort into developing the appropriate socio-economic platform to address poverty.
In response to this we have developed a South African non-paper through deliberations in government and with the various stakeholder sectors including civil society, business and labour. Based on this we have put up a list of 22 priority areas for international negotiations, front-loaded by six core areas that focus around basic needs and furthering sustainable
development through efficiency and efficient use of resources.
Those six sectors are: Water, energy, food security, health, education and technology. In water, we are talking about specific targets for access to water for some 1.5 billion people worldwide that don’t have access at present. We are talking about integrated water resources management and protocols around shared basins. We are talking about a sanitation target for the world. We recognise that the Millennium Declaration and the Bonn Declaration do not have sanitation targets, but it is quite meaningless to talk about sustainable development in the water field and the environmental field without one. We have put forward and ambitious target of halving the number of people who currently don’t have access to hygienic sanitation by 2015.
In the area of energy the global discussion in the Committee for Sustainable Development (CSD) since Rio has focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. South Africa has endorsed the Millennium Declaration target on energy, of halving the number of people who currently don’t have access – some 1 billion people worldwide – but has injected a focus on access to energy and particularly modern energy services into the debate. But while we are getting to the modern energy services we must use the means that are available to ensure that people who do not have reasonable access to energy get that access.
The energy debate has become quite complicated because it is now in the realm of global energy access funds while NEPAD is also talking about regional energy access funds. The debate around electrification versus energy access has become a vibrant one. I think the way the debate is going lends itself to the poverty eradication outcome.
On food security and sustainable agriculture there are two things to recognise. One is that we need immediate action to reverse the current mal-distribution of food resources around the world that denies people access. The second is market access for agricultural products. But the core focus here is around doubling agricultural production, or whatever the factor is – for Africa it is a doubling – particularly in the areas of great need.
Health is the fourth issue and here addressing the problems around communicable diseases and HIV/Aids is a high priority. But we also need to address water-borne diseases. Much of the infant and child morbidity and mortality in the world today is related to diarrhoea and acute upper respiratory tract infections, which have a very direct link to water-borne diseases. So we need a holistic approach around the Health for All strategy that the WHO has started to talk about.
The fifth area is education: here we are talking about expanding education in the classical sense. We are also talking about skills development and literacy as core movers of the programme. The Millennium Declaration target on education is vague and part of the challenge is to make it more concrete.
Technology is not considered a classical sector. Here South Africa is introducing a deviation from the international discussion on technology transfer that has gone on over the last ten years. We are still talking about technology transfer as part of an overall strategy but with technology partnerships in the forefront. We want to engineer ourselves into a position where we are partners in technology development and technology transfer and technology customisation and joint ventures. We are doing this because the developing world has become a wonderful museum of ill-suited technology inappropriately transferred from northern to southern countries.
These are the six core areas that we have front-loaded our priority list with. They are areas that talk very directly to the theme of poverty eradication. Needless to say each of them has a very strong sustainable development component and, through that, a strong environmental component.
The next area that we thought it would be really useful to work on is the challenge of having an equalised discussion around the pillars of sustainable development. Because, quite frankly, before the first of the PrepComs for WSSD the discussions around sustainable development were environmental discussions that acknowledged there was also an economic pillar and a social pillar.
There were two really important events that provided some impetus for equalising the economic pillar. One was the whole movement towards the Monterrey Finance for Development Conference, which sparked a lot of discussion. The other was the Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks. Although the Doha round proved to be reasonably successful, South Africa is still stinging a bit because our developing country partners still carry some of the scepticism that they expressed before Doha.
These two events put the economic platform on the forefront of the agenda and established that many of the solutions that we were looking for on sustainable development were around redressing the current global inequality on the economic front.
So we are pushing for such adventurous things as redressing debt, both through cancellation and debt relief. We are talking very openly on the market access issues and about fundamental things like the current attempts to transform the global financial architecture and arguing that a more radical approach is required.
All this means that WSSD, if it is going to be serious about dealing with the issues of poverty and lending itself to real sustainable development, has to do what Rio did not manage to do. Rio produced a remarkable formula for sustainable development in Agenda 21, the Rio principles are as sound as they can be, but we have not had ten years of implementation. Instead we have had ten years of discussions about why implementation did not happen: maybe one of the reasons is that Rio did in fact not have a sufficiently action-orientated outcome as part of its agenda of action.
Rio produced a wonderful intellectual argument and there was reason to believe that people would go away and develop national sustainable development strategies to ensure implementation. We want a better guarantee this time. We want a series of action programmes that set out a ten-year work plan in each of the priority areas. We want a political declaration that talks to the concept of a global deal, a deal for sustainable development. And that is not only between governments, but it is a deal between governments and the various other partners, with business, with civil society, with the development finance institutions and the international financial institutions.
We are engaged in a series of endeavours to ensure that some of this occurs. It is not an easy path – it is a fairly radical outcome. It raises the question of an international forum for sustainable development governance. At the moment it appears that we are pushing for a very centrist approach and perhaps maybe we are. But one of the reasons is that we want to guarantee centralised coordination of action at least in the initiation phase, before it works itself into working agendas at regional and national levels.
Mobilising around a global deal is not easy. The current situation is close to ideal for northern countries. There are fairly conservative governments in those countries and the concept of a global deal between North and South is not particularly palatable. We are doing our best with various developing country partners to lure people into a debate on how the sustainable development programme should look. The way we understand it is that by discussing how to proceed on priority areas we inevitably reach decisions around a global deal without actually talking about the concept.
The other thing we are doing is providing a practical example. We are not only presenting a framework for a global plan of action around these priority areas, we are developing implementation plans through NEPAD, which is our regional model for sustainable development at a continental level. We can share that as well because we are also looking for partners around NEPAD. And the partnerships around NEPAD may describe the formulas and the ways of working for the partnerships in the global arena.
To sum up, our basic approach is to look for a deal that reflects, to some extent, the continental view we are engineering for Africa. A deal that also reflects some of what we are engineering around SADC and the thinking that sustainable development may not be one strategy, it may be a series of strategies like South Africa has. Because South Africa has a combination of its anti-poverty strategy, with the RDP, with the urban renewal programme, with the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategy and so on.
All of this is pretty ambitious but there is a fair amount of international support and we are hoping to get very strong momentum from the fourth PrepCom in Bali, Indonesia, that we can carry to Johannesburg and produce outcomes that will beat a path towards addressing poverty globally in a sustainable way.
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