Rio Plus Ten: Politics, Poverty and the Environment

Rio Plus Ten: Politics, Poverty and the Environment

Neil Middleton

Language: English

Pages: 216

ISBN: 0745319556

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The World Summit on Sustainable Development took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2002. In this book, the authors look at the agenda established since the original Rio conference in 1992 and cover the events of the intervening years: global warming and the unfolding arguments over climate change, energy, water and sanitation, patents and many other issues. They examine what progress-- if any--has been made. Offering a critical analysis of the links between neo-liberal economics and transnational organisations, the authors expose the poverty of so-called international protocols and resolutions which claim to offer solutions. They show how, in virtually every case, these resolutions remain part of the problem of continuing poverty and environmental degradation in the non-Western world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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