The governmental delegation gathered at the WSSD should be discussing the follow-up on Agenda 21. What we actually get is sustainable development redefined as sustainable free trade. Agenda 21 married environment and development, promised to eradicate poverty, to change consumption and production patterns, established common but differentiated responsibilities, legitimised precautionary measures, and reaffirmed the rights of women and their role in sustainable development. It contained lists of actions that governments, international organizations and major groups would have to undertake to move to sustainable development. It provided cost estimates for these actions. It opened doors to the NGOs and grassroots people’s organizations in the global negotiations, but it also strengthened the voice of business. Agenda 21 was not without weaknesses. Development was understood as more of the same, no real solutions to poverty eradication were proposed, and environmental measures seemed rather half-hearted in comparison to magnitude of changes required to move to sustainability.
But in mid 90s. the establishment of WTO, and its Coherence Agreement with the IMF and the World Bank consolidated the neo-liberal model of globalization. In response, NGOs came to promote sustainable development as an alternative framework for global governance. After Johannesburg, sustainable development will no longer be an alternative framework.
Given how negotiations proceed, the discussion on sustainable development has been re-crafted into debating trade, and hedging positions for the next WTO ministerial in Cancun. Much is said on poverty reduction (no one talks of poverty eradication any more) but the only solution proposed to poverty and environmental degradation is more trade liberalization on current terms, and more market access. Partnerships are promoted without discussing accountability and rights. In this form public/private partnerships will lead to further privatisation of the state and whatever remains of global commons. Precautionary principle is replaced by sustainable ecosystem management, and the principle of common and differentiated responsibilities is pass?. Paragraph 47 on health promotes traditional healing practices (read: female genital mutilation), and religious values (read: stoning of women) instead of bothering with addressing women’s human and reproductive rights. Anyhow, who bothers about rights and values while discussing trade. Even if all brackets from the Draft Program of Action are removed, this is still a bad document which questions the commitments made in Rio and erases social and environmental meanings of sustainable development in-built in Agenda 21 instead on building upon the previous agreements.
Women have come to the UN conference with sincere missions to assure a rights-based approach to sustainable development, to lobby for a binding agreement on corporate responsibility and accountability, to lobby for cancellation of developing countries debt and recognition of the ecological debt, to make sure trade agreements are compatible with sustainable development, to get a fairer deal for developing countries, to get rid of dirty subsidies that benefit big business or rich farmers and deprive the poor of their livelihoods, to promote fair trade, to lobby for shifting resources from military purposes to sustainable development. Our goals are to promote peace, safeguard the environment, economic and gender justice, to ascertain human rights, including women’s reproductive rights, to work for accountable and rights-based partnerships, and to promote changing consumption and production patterns as a way out of poverty and means for safeguarding the environment.
Women’s organizations strongly disagree and warn about the effects of dismantling social and ecological basis of sustainable development. Sustainable development is not about sustaining free trade. It is about sustainable human livelihoods and a living planet.
We need a Johannesburg Plan of Action that builds on Agenda 21. We need to promote alternative policy frameworks, as well as local alternatives such as local sustainable production and consumption systems, and local markets. Sustainable production and consumption is not only the way to safeguard the environment but also a way to prevent poverty by keeping control of resources within local communities. Both alternative policy frameworks and community alternatives need to place greater value on women’s caring and reproductive work and take into account heath and safety issues and in particular women’s reproductive health and rights. Gender equality is not only the business of women. On the road to sustainable alternatives, women need as partners caring ecological men committed to gender equality, and governments with the political will to implement these changes.
Johannesburg, 30 August 2002