Rio Plus Ten: Politics, Poverty and the Environment
Neil Middleton
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0745319556
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
poverty eradication, water and sanitation, sustainable production and consumption, energy, chemicals, management of the natural resource base, corporate responsibility, health, sustainable development of small island states, sustainable development for Africa. What Did They Agree? 27 Plainly, several of these overlap and are intertwined, particularly in the cases of the first two, the fourth and the eighth, all of which are dealt with in the initial long section on eradicating poverty. Box
the agreements into which they have already entered. It is significant that the Plan, twenty years after the target was first set, is still calling for the developed countries to increase their overseas development aid (ODA) budgets to 0.7 per cent of GNP (79.a), yet commitment to the social objectives of the WSSD would probably call for an even greater proportion. Paragraphs 75–9 summarise preceding commitments: Agenda 21, the Millennium Declaration, the Third United Nations Conference on the
between the campaign to achieve the MDGs and the realities of international agreements. In paragraph 42.r manic equivocations mount up: With a view to enhancing synergy and mutual supportiveness, taking into account the decisions under the relevant agreements, promote the discussions, without prejudging their outcome, with regard to the relationships between the Convention and agreements related to international trade and intellectual property rights, as outlined in the Doha Ministerial
he needed to launch his subsequent unilateral and corporation driven programme. We have already mentioned the role of his alliances in the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the abandonment of the Doha promises of cheap drugs for people too poor to pay their inflated prices. But these are both symptoms of a far larger phenomenon, the descent into the Barbarisation suggested, by the Group, as one possible trajectory that the powerful states of the world might follow. Barbarisation is presented,
the failure even to manage matters like the sustainable use of water, growing hunger and disease control, but also in the failure to assist the excluded. The Group sees this neglect as resulting in an anarchy which would encourage the appearance of ‘powerful global syndicates able to field fearsome fighting units in their battle against international policing’. The prophetic tone of this picture continues: The forces of global order take action ... [and] form the self-styled Alliance for Global