PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

PRESS BRIEFING BY UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

The message that would hopefully emerge from the World Summit on Sustainable Development was that the insidious global spread of poverty and environmental stress was the real security threat that must be addressed, Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, said at a Headquarters press briefing this morning.

Presenting a report entitled "Global Challenge, Global Opportunity", prepared for the Summit, which will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September, Mr. Desai said it mobilized information around the five priority areas identified by Secretary-General Kofi Annan:  water, energy, agriculture, biodiversity and health.  The picture that emerged was one of urgency, he added.

Mr. Desai, who is Secretary-General of the World Summit, said it was time to move beyond the phrase "sustainable development" into more specific actions dealing with sustainable energy, sustainable agriculture, sustainable use of water resources, meeting people's water and sanitation needs and eradicating poverty.  The great challenge of Johannesburg was to determine how to engage governments and mobilize non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local authorities and the private sector. 

One important difference between Johannesburg and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, he said, was the degree of global political agreement on the agenda of poverty eradication, children's and maternal health and education.  That was much stronger now because of the Millennium Summit and the Millennium Development Goals.  Indeed, there was a convergence of commitment around those goals, both among the donors and developing countries.  Part of the challenge of Johannesburg was to connect that agenda with the resource agenda.  It was not possible to reduce poverty, for instance, without also addressing land and water issues, or to improve children's health without also addressing issues of water, sanitation and air quality.  The key was to connect that politically strong agenda on poverty, education and health with the natural resources agenda. 

Citing the three-kilometre thick “Asian brown cloud”, a cocktail of chemical substances and aerosols resulting from unsustainable energy use in the region, he said it hung over a vast area of Asia, lowering temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, causing droughts in some places and floods in others, and increasing the chances of temperature inversion, leading to severe health problems.  Emerging from Johannesburg should be a commitment by governments to take an integrated view of sustainable development, recognize the urgency of the problems and devise practical ways to take NGO-led innovations from the community levels to scale.

Asked whether he had identified agriculture as a leading concern, he said he had.  On the one hand, there were the problems arising from subsistence agriculture, where much of the focus was on meeting people's needs in food and fibre, or the food security angle.  There, he was searching for methods to increase productivity in a sustainable way in order to meet needs.  On the other

end, the agricultural sector should pay more attention to low-tillage, low-chemical and biosafe methods. 

Responding to a question about the level of United States representation and the significance of President George W. Bush's possible absence from Johannesburg, he said the United States had been effectively engaged in the preparatory process at a high level and in a very substantive way.  The United States had also been very involved in the partnership initiatives.  He said he would certainly look forward to the President’s presence and that the official reply he had received from Washington about its delegation’s composition was that no decision had been taken yet.

Asked about the goal of using more renewable energy like biomass when that was killing people in Asia, the Under-Secretary-General said 2 billion people worldwide were living in a pre-industrial energy system.  Many traditional ways of harvesting and using biomass involved cooking with inefficient stoves, resulting in severe levels of indoor air pollution that had affected some 2 million women and children. 

That was not what the report had meant by promoting renewable energy, he explained.  Rather, it proposed more efficient and safe ways to use biomass and other sources, such as wind or water energy, or improved ways of using traditional biomass to virtually eliminate indoor air pollution and greatly raise the efficiency of wood-burning stoves.  Of major concern was how to include the 2 billion people who were "outside the modern energy net" in a clean industrial system, while increasing renewable energy resources.

Had negotiators agreed yet on what percentage of energy should be renewable? the correspondent asked. 

Mr. Desai said they had not.  Everyone had, however, agreed on the need to increase renewable sources and there was also complete agreement on the specific activities that should be undertaken to promote that.  The outstanding question was simply a matter of how to formulate that goal.

Another correspondent asked how Mr. Desai intended to keep the focus at Johannesburg on the real issues of development and not allow the Summit to degenerate into “another North-South or rich-poor battle".

He replied that some highly substantive agreements had already been reached, and some very important forward-looking steps had already been agreed in several areas, including in the areas of energy, natural disasters and sustainable consumption.  What had been agreed in the text were far more substantive commitments by countries to focus on what they needed to do to achieve sustainable consumption. 

He added that the dispute was mainly over timetables.  The North-South issues were not side issues, however; they were absolutely integral to the discussion.  A "constructive compromise" must emerge and he sensed much willingness to look for common ground.  Pointing out that 75 per cent of the text had been agreed and just 25 per cent remained to be resolved, he said, "It's tough stuff, but that's what

conferences are for.  If it was easy, we wouldn't need to bring all those people to Johannesburg".

Asked whether the conference would start early for pre-negotiations, Mr. Desai said South Africa had invited all delegations to arrive three days early.  On Friday, the regional groups would meet, and on Saturday and Sunday before the start of the formal Summit, an informal process between countries would take place in the hope of advancing the issues.  When the formal conference started on Monday, significant progress would have been made on resolving the issues.

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