[PEN-L:28697] Patrick Bond and Michael Dorsey

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

Green Capitalism and the New African Imperialists.
Tales on the Road to the Joburg Summit
by Patrick Bond and Michael Dorsey

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will be held in
Johannesburg beginning on August 24, proceeded by various civil
society conferences and events. Its purported aim is to find a common
international discourse, strategies and tactics that allow
governments, business and civil society to eradicate poverty, end
unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, and combat
environmental degradation. But will it flop?

Host president Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's
Development (NEPAD) is one of the main agenda items, having recently
gone through official state endorsement processes at both the June
summit of the G-8 leaders in Alberta, Canada, and the July launch of
the Africa Union in Durban.  Pronounced "knee-pad" by many civil
society advocates, the "Partnership" may be a shot-gun wedding
forcing the rest of the continent to its knees, bowing to the whims
and demands of proto-capitalists, like Finance Minister Trevor Manuel
and his Pretoria cronies. The WSSD will also be the site of a mass
anti-capitalist march on August 31, although there are two major
camps on the South African left claiming the tradition of the World
Social Forum. Regardless of whether a labour/church-backed
pro-government grouping--the Civil Society Forum--continues to crowd
out the independent-left Civil Society Indaba, the WSSD will not be
left unscathed. The latter group has the support of urban
anti-privatisation and rural landless people's organisations and
until February was the official UN host, before being booted out
unceremoniously during internecine conflict with larger, more
mainstream groups.

In addition, a variety of NGO side-events by groups like Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth International, the International Forum on
Globalization, Corpwatch and many sectoral advocacy groups will keep
the pressure on. Security is likely to be sufficiently tight as to
prevent disruptions. As many as 100 heads of state are expected, with
60,000 other delegates, press and activists.

Even aside from civil society protest, bad content and process
threaten to delegitimise the official event, as happened at the June
Preparatory Committee in Bali, Indonesia. The very name
"Johannesburg" may go down in infamy as the global elites' last-gasp
attempt--and failure--to address a world careening out of control.

The ghosts-of-Earth-Summit-past configured Johannesburg to
compromise the environment.  The 1992 Rio event did establish the Rio
Principles, Agenda 21, the UN Convention on Climate Change, the
Convention on Biological Diversity, the Statement of Forest
Principles and the Commission on Sustainable Development for
implementation.  Yet Rio also set in motion third-wayism--championing
market solutions for securing environmental protection and promoting
free trade as the sole path to sustainability.

Not surprisingly, the German Green party's Heinrich Boell Stiftung
recently issued the Jo'burg Memo, which perhaps most eloquently and
thoroughly summarises the criticisms of WSSD work to date. Editor
Wolfgang Sachs claims that the institutional process has gone forward
"without tangible global results. In particular, economic
globalisation has largely washed away gains made on the micro level,
spreading an exploitative economy across the globe and exposing
natural resources in the South and in Russia to the pull of the world
market."

Sachs credits elites with only an increase in the global surface
area under environmental protection, slowing carbon emissions and
declining ozone-depleting CFC production. "Apart from these cases,"
he continues, "the excessive strain placed by human beings on
nature's sources, sites, and sinks has continued to rise. The
extinction of species and habitats has increased, the destruction of
ancient forests continues unabated, the degradation of fertile soil
has worsened, over-fishing of oceans has continued, and the new
threat of genetically engineered disruption has emerged."

In theory, the Johannesburg Summit is meant to produce a negotiated
leader's statement, a negotiated plan of action and a non-negotiated
list of sustainable development initiatives involving states,
interstate relations, and business and civil society sectors. But few
areas of consensus exist.

Several alternative texts, for example, were tabled about the word
"globalisation" at the end of the third PrepComm. The US proposed a
positive statement, the EU suggested a balanced text, and the
G-77/China insisted on a short paragraph that avoided definitions and
instead focused on difficulties experienced by developing countries.
More substantive controversies continue over the role of the profit
motive, "public-private partnerships" and market mechanisms in
environment and development. The WSSD's main problems are its
tendency to allow increasing scope for commodification of nature, its
inadequate measures to address poverty and excessive wealth, and its
orientation to implementation via TNCs, instead of through
strengthened nation-states.

The major background issue is whether the World Trade Organisation
will become the default organisation and set of rules governing
Multilateral Environmental Agreements.

Elite capacities to restore both the earth and the social wage have
been questionable since at least the 1992 Summit. Then billionaire
Maurice Strong, the conference Chairman, helped eliminate the UN
Centre on Transnational Corporations, hatched the World Business
Council on Sustainable Development and mapped a role for corporations
to guide (un)sustainable development.  Now WSSD Chairman Nitin Desai
has actively blocked negotiations for a side agreement on binding
Corporate Accountability, and endorsed the involvement of the newly
created Business Action for Sustainable Development Group-which will
have a parallel meeting in Joburg in a building adjacent to the
government proceedings.

Rio inaugurated the 21st century's eco-social war for the planet,
the next battleground will be Johannesburg. But what the framers of
corporate environmentalism did not count on then was that where there
is government and corporate collusion to plunder the environment and
hijack humanity, the radical forces of civil society are never too
far behind.

***

Bond is editor of Fanon's Warning: A Civil Society Reader on the New
Partnership for Africa's Development (Africa World Press, 2002) and
Dorsey is Thurgood Marshall fellow at Dartmouth University, New
Hampshire.