Agenda 21 under review in Bali meeting

Emil Salim

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. Infant, child and maternal mortality rates are high in many developing countries, in spite of the fact that the required treatment and medicines are available.

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. Its work program covers implementation-related issues in agriculture, service, market access for nonagricultural products, trade- related aspects of intellectual property rights, trade and environment, interaction between trade and competition policy, transparency in government procurement, trade facilities and transfer of technologies.

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. Agreement has been reached in most crucial areas, such as mobilizing domestic and international financial resources for development: foreign direct investment and other private investment flows, international trade as an engine for development, increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development, external debt, etc.

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.