Agenda 21 under review in Bali conference

Agenda 21 under review in Bali conference

From May 27 until June 7 delegations headed by ministers from
member states of the United Nations will arrive in Bali to attend
the final preparatory meeting ahead of the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) to be held in Johannesburg, South
Africa, in early September 2002.

The purpose is to negotiate the Implementation Program
document that further elaborates Agenda 21 based on the Rio
Principles agreed in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
in 1992. The General Assembly of the United Nations has agreed to
review and improve the implementation of Agenda 21 after ten
years.

Agenda 21 contains agreements on various programs of
sustainable development as the most significant outcome of the
Earth Summit. The programs are intended to give substance to the
Rio Principle, which embodied the new approach to sustainable
development.

While the conventional development model follow a single track
along the economic road, the sustainable development model has a
triple track of economic, social and environmental development.
The development of a nation or business takes on a holistic
approach that cuts across all these three dimensions
simultaneously.

Water is an indispensable resource for human survival. Social
development policy must open access to safe drinking water for
the billions of the poor who have no access. But water is also
resource that is demanded by many sectors, such as agriculture,
fisheries, industry, human settlement, tourism, etc.

Economic development policy must be geared toward the most
efficient use of water to obtain the maximum benefit per drop of
water. Water is abundant in the rainy season, it even creates
floods that harm people, but is scarce in the dry season. It
requires an environmental development policy that conserves
nature's capacity to absorb water.

Sustainable development requires a comprehensive social,
economic and environmental policy that simultaneously assures
water for the poor, its efficient use in production and
consumption and the conservation of water for its sustained
availability. This line of thinking does not only apply for water
but all other resources and human activities as well.

After ten years of implementing Agenda 21 and the Rio
Principle, what has been achieved?

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in
his report Implementing Agenda 21 last December 2001 observed
that there are four areas where the gap in implementation is
visible.

First, a fragmented approach has been adopted toward
sustainable development. Policies and programs, at the national
and the international levels, have generally not integrated
economic, social and environmental objectives in decision-making.

Second, since the 1992 Rio Summit no major changes have
occurred in the unsustainable patterns of consumption and
production, which have put the natural life-support system in
peril. The prevailing value system reflected in those patterns is
among the main driving forces, which determine the use of natural
resources.

Third, there is a lack of mutual coherent policies in the
areas of finance, trade, investment technology and sustainable
development in this era of globalization. Policy on these issues
remains compartmentalized, governed more by short-term rather
than long-term considerations.

Fourth, the financial resources required for implementing
Agenda 21 have not been forthcoming and the mechanism for the
transfer of technologies has not improved.

These are the four areas that have created the gap between
what had been agreed in Rio ten years ago and what has been
implemented since. As a consequence of this gap, the world in the
year 2000 shows a dramatic increase in economic welfare for 20
percent of the world's population.

However, it also shows serious environmental degradation as
revealed in global climate change, rise in sea water level, land
desertification and degradation, shrinking forest area,
deterioration of biodiversity and increase in levels of river and
air pollution.

Meanwhile 80 percent of the world population is still striving
to reach a humane standard of living. More than a billion people
live on less than one dollar a day and an estimated 2.8 billion
on less than two dollars a day.

Close to 800 million people are undernourished in the
developing world while food production is sufficient in the
world.

In education about 120 million primary school-age children are
not in school. More than half of them are girls. In higher
education, the number of girls reduces sharply. In technology the
gap is sharply widening among developed and developing countries
as is clearly demonstrated by the digital divide. The list could
continue.

Suffice it is to demonstrate that the gap is growing into an
increasing divergence between the developed and the developing
countries and there is an urgent need to change it into
convergence.

In a special session of the UN General Assembly attended by
the heads of state in September 2000, the UN Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) had been adopted with the goal to halve
the number of people with an income of less than one dollar a
day; to halve the number of people who suffer from hunger; to
achieve universal primary education, to reduce mortality rates,
to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, all by the year
2015. In brief: to eradicate poverty once and for all.

This requires financial resources and technology with a
conducive economic environment that improves trade, finance and
development relations between the developed and the developing
countries.

In Doha, Qatar, ministers at the World Trade Organization
conference in Nov. 2001, agreed on a new round of trade
negotiations to be concluded not later than 1 January 2005.

This was followed by the adoption of the Monterey Consensus by
the heads of state in the International Conference on Financing
for Development in March 2002 in Monterey, Mexico.

This is to be accomplished by enhancing the coherence and
consistency of the international monetary, financial and trading
system in support of development.

Riding on this wave of development since the declaration of
the UN Millennium Development Goals (Sept. 2001), followed by
Doha WTO Ministerial Declaration (Nov. 2001) and the Monterey
Consensus (March 2002), this World Summit on Sustainable
Development puts them all together in Bali into the framework of
sustainable development.