JOHANNESBURG, 29 August — The Earth Summit was deadlocked yesterday over vast farm subsidies in rich nations and globalization despite progress on trade and financing Third World aid, a key negotiator said. “We have come a long way,” said John Ashe, the delegate from Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean who is trying to broker a deal on trade and aid finance at the mammoth 10-day summit which will in Johannesburg end on Sept. 4.
“But we haven’t resolved issues of subsidies,” he told reporters in a break in the talks last evening. Defining globalization was also among issues still dividing delegates from almost 200 nations. He said that it looked increasingly likely that civil servants might have to give up and hand the most thorny problems to environment ministers to resolve in coming days.
Many poor nations say the United States is the main block, refusing more aid or fresh environmental targets at the summit which is meant to find ways to halve global poverty by 2015 and promote economic growth that will not damage the environment.
Developing nations at the World Summit on Sustainable Development say that subsidies paid to farmers in rich nations, totaling about a billion dollars a day, are a protectionist barrier to their exports.
Anti-privatization and anti-globalization activists, meanwhile, met in Alexandra, the country’s poorest slum, and said they would march “in their thousands” on Saturday to the wealthy suburb of Sandton where the summit is taking place. Former South African president Nelson Mandela called on delegates to help the more than one billion people who do not have access to clean drinking water.
“In impoverishment, it is the absence to clean water that strikes me most strongly,” Mandela said as he opened the “WaterDome” exhibition on the fringes of the summit. The UN announced agreement on a key deal to restore the world’s fisheries to their maximum sustainable yield by 2015. (The Independent)
