Report from Jo’burg – Day 3
Things are beginning to warm up. Yesterday, it seems, I was one of 2,500 NGO representatives denied access to the main Summit venue. Official story is that fire regulations limit the number of participants in the main venue (Sandton) to 6,000. But, the UN alone has invited 11,000 of its own delegates and a further 12,000 NGO delegates. And those 23,000 make up around a third of the total of officially certified delegates. Why, one wonders? NGO meetings all across town are asking the same question.
This morning’s paper carries the story of a woman from Sudan whose village worked for eight months to get together the money required to get her to the Summit: ‘They did that to ensure the voice of her people would be heard in the negotiations, but now she is not allowed in’. Terrible! Shameful!
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Perhaps……..but then again, it is reasonable to ask just how the woman from Sudan imagined that she, along with the other 65,000 participants, was going to get the undivided attention of the decision-makers. Truth is, there are two quite different events going on here. One is clearly defined – a United Nations conference with the 3-fold aim of issuing a declaration by governments on sustainable development; agreeing a schedule of targets and timetables for governmental and UN agency actions; and establishing a programme of partnership initiatives to be jointly undertaken by governments and NGOs. Relatively few of the visitors to Jo’burg have come for this event.
The second is the great melting pot of causes, visions and campaigns that seems to congregate on the fringes of all major conferences these days. Here there is more space to be heard. In smaller venues all over the city, there are teach-ins, demonstrations, talks, book launches, dinners, tours…and on and on and on. This is where the Sudanese woman has some chance of talking and of being heard.
Just one wee problem. Jo’burg is a big, brash, car-dependent city and the various venues are scattered across its length and its breadth. Taxis are expensive. Walking, especially after dark, is considered dangerous. Publicity for events is generally poor, with no comprehensive central guide of what is happening and where.
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In consequence, the islands of beauty and inspiration – a talk by Jane Goodall of radiant clarity and humility, Michael Meacher’s passion and eloquence, chance encounters with Inuit community-leaders, Mexican land rights activists, handicraft workers from Cape Town – lie scattered in a sea of car journeys, traffic jams, waits for taxis, scanning of scattered reports and publications to find out what is going on. With little access to television, I feel a thousand miles from the Summit center in Sandton, and feel rather inclined to ask you to send me reports on what is going on there.
Our favourite taxi driver is Alex from Soweto. What really won him our affections was the way that he drove half way across town to deliver the wallet of one our GEN team who had dropped it in the car, before we even realized it was gone. Alex is thoughtful, intelligent and sophisticated - how he has ended up driving a taxi is anyone’s guess. On a long drive to a distant venue today, he was giving me the low-down on the history of the gold and diamond mines that lie under Jo’burg. ‘Do you know’, he said, ‘there’s nothing under Jo’burg – it is hollow’.
Hmmmm.
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Back on the streets, a peaceful (though admittedly unauthorised) demonstration was met with stun grenades and mass arrests. Experienced campaigners seem to be genuinely surprised at the toughness of the police reaction and the papers are full of ominous warnings from government and police sources that ‘the full force of the law will be used’. Saturday will be the big day. Only five of the 15 demonstrations that applied for licenses have been granted them – the others are making little secret of their intention to be on the streets anyway.
There seems to be a certain inexorable inevitability to the up-coming street battles. While some of the NGOs may have unrealistic expectations about participation in the plenary sessions in the Summit hall, the sight of government and business delegates being driven into the heart of the complex in huge cars, while the people, in whose interest they have us believe they govern and trade, scramble around with little assistance in a usually vain search for permits creates its own dynamic.
We do not seem to be able to do these things well. The structures and rituals favour frustration and confrontation. We need to find a new way.
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Jo’burg report – day 4
The biblical Babel story is often misunderstood. What pissed God off so bad that he just about wiped us out was not the proliferation of tongues, but rather that people tried to develop a single language, giving them the potential to work together to build a tower that might reach Heaven. Makes you wonder what he had to hide up there.
Anyway, disturbing parallels here in Jo’burg. This so-called ‘World’ Summit is a solidly anglophone affair. There are undoubtedly multi-lingual translation facilities in the Summit center in Sandton. However, in the many meetings I have been to, only one –the People’s Earth Summit hearing on the rights of indigenous people – provided translation as part of the service. Those multi-linguists among us have been left to whisper translations to our non-anglophone neighbours. The francophone West Africans are cutting a particularly sorry shape, wandering about trying to find people to translate for them in sessions they desperately want to participate in. I have been able to help to some degree, but heck, I have a job to do here promoting the Global Ecovillage Network.
The loss of linguistic diversity is disturbing. The very fact that it does not even seem to have been an issue for our South African hosts is deeply troubling. Our nemesis will, I suspect, lie less in the wrath of a spiteful deity than in the loss of stories and ways of being that are intrinsically wrapped up in the wealth of our languages. (Or perhaps they are the same thing?) Everything we have learned teaches us that in diversity lies strength.
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Highway blues. Long lines of cars under the sun as police escorts with their blue-flashing sirens steer the powerful to the head of the Summit-bound queues. Signs along the highway speak of Jo’burg’s attitude to the whole circus: ‘Gadafhi, Mugabe, Castro, Blair: whoops, there goes the neighbourhood’, ‘Recycle your attitudes’.
Rumours drift out from the conference centre. Occasionally positive. One improbable report quotes a US spokesman saying that the US is ‘taking a fairly strong stance’ against agricultural subsidies. Another story is leaked that the US has, unexpectedly, signed up to a serious effort to save dwindling fish stocks. Yet another report ‘from sources close to the ministerial meetings’ suggests that 85 per cent of the text for the final heads of government statement has been agreed. Sounds promising – until one remembers that it is the final 15 per cent that constitutes the critical and controversial stuff.
A case in point is what the statement will say about renewable energy, a critical area if we are to seriously address the problems of global warming. The EU has been leading efforts to push for firm targets for large increases in the adoption of renewables. The news emerging this morning is that the EU has abandoned its position and is instead proposing a meagre one per cent increase in the renewables target. Green groups have predictably and justifiably labeled this as a complete sell-out. Depressing.
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Consensus decision-making. Great concept. Decisions are taken slowly and carefully, with every attempt made to ensure that the minority is not marginalised. As we know at Findhorn, the larger the group of decision-makers, the more complex the process. How to keep everybody on board and still move forward?
We think we have problems?! This Summit process is also governed by consensus-style decision-making. The governments of the world all putting their name to one document. True, the powerful have their ways and means to ‘persuade’ the less powerful to be accommodating to their agendas. Nonetheless, is it any wonder that NGO representatives are describing the draft texts of the final declaration that are emerging as ‘impenetrable and nebulous’?
At last, today, I found something of the buzz I had been hoping to find. I spent the day manning the GEN stand at Nasrec, the principal NGO site. There is much unhappiness at the distance of Nasrec from the Sandton centre (35 kilometres) that effectively keeps the NGOs at a distance from the core Summit process – this cannot have been an accident from the point of view of the organisers. Still, we are making the very best of it and Nasrec is hosting a great festival of good people coming together to display their initiatives and schemes and plans – many of them highly inspiring.
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In the central courtyard, there are cultural displays all day. My favourite today was a wonderful singing, swaying, circle dance (not like anything I have ever seen in the Universal Hall on a Wednesday evening) from the Small Farmer Convergence. There were farmers from Ethiopia, China, all over black Africa, Sweden and many, many other countries. They were carrying banners or flyers in support of freeing Tibet and Palestine, banning GMOs, supporting a greater role for women in decision-making and demanding access to clean water.The flyer they were distributing included this section:
‘We are the world peasant farmers and fisherfolk.
We are 7 out of 10 of the world’s population.
We are hard-pressed on every side
But NOT crushed
For farming is our culture.
We may be perplexed
But NOT in despair
For hope is our way of life.
We are persecuted
But NOT abandoned because you care.
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We have come to the World Summit to declare that:
We believe and therefore we speak with the voices of 70% of the world’s population.
NOTHING can destroy the human spirit
Nothing can destroy the spirit of the farmers and fisherfolk to farm and fish.
Farming and fishing is our culture.
Farming and fishing is our life.
And as they danced and sang, a goodly number of them appeared to do so in English.
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SUMMARY OF NGO PRESS CONFERENCES
AND MEDIA COVERAGE
at the U.N. Media Center, at Sandton Convention Center
Even as the General Assembly approves the results of Johannesburg, it has become clear that the next phase of the sustainable development agenda will face an even more difficult political challenge. As was all too obvious at Jo’burg, the increasingly-powerful international political right has little interest in implementing the carefully-established principles negotiated in the decade since Rio.
Indeed, compared to the dismal results of last month's negotiations on climate change [COP 8] in New Delhi , the results of Johannesburg were not all that miserable. At the Summit, NGOs, working with a few progressive governments, were able to battle those opposed to sustainable development to at least a standstill on most issues – and achieved a few significant victories [e.g. the commitments to ratify Kyoto; the rejection of WTO primacy over MEAs; the agreement on initial language on corporate accountability].
Those successes resulted from a combination of efforts, including the extensive lobbying of governments by NGOs inside Sandton, as well as the tireless organizing by NGOs as the tireless organizing by NGOs outside Sandton that culminated in the peaceful and highly-successful rally against globalization and landlessness, on August 31.
Reinforcing the impact of both of these areas of NGO activity was the broad and effective use of news media to reach influential audiences throughout the world, even as the negotiations were taking place.
Though not reaching the saturation levels of Rio, news coverage of the Jo'burg Summit was moderate-to-heavy in all regions – particularly in Western Europe, southern Africa, Japan, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Venezuela. |
That coverage was shaped to an unusual extent by the positions and comments of NGO speakers. One sample of 240 print articles on the Summit, in English, by major news organizations showed that 108 – or forty-five percent – contained either quotes from specific individuals or organizations, or references to the role of NGOs, activists or civil society.
This coverage was encouraged by the media activities of NGOs working at several venues throughout Johannesburg. One of the most central of these was the U.N. Media Center, at Sandton.
Following is a summary of the topics, speakers and participating organizations at the seven press conferences presented by coalitions of NGOs, and those by Farmers and Youth, at one of those venues, the Media Center. The Sandton press conferences were coordinated by the International Media Advocacy project of Earth Media, in cooperation with the U.N. Department of Public Information [DPI] and U.N. DESA, the Summit Secretariat.
A complete compilation of the schedules, media advisories, and DPI transcripts for these press conferences is available at: www.earthmedia-summit.org
Photos of each of the Sandton press conferences and speakers are indicated below, and can be found at: www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/020826pressphotos.htm Video copies of each press conference are also available.
A complete Report on the Media Activities at Sandton organized by Earth Media can be obtained from earthmedia@igc.org
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1. The Johannesburg Summit:
Sharing the Planet, or Selling the Earth?
Monday, 26 August 2002, 2:00 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0029.jpg
Speakers:
Marcelo Furtado, Toxic Trade Advisor – Greenpeace International
Chee Yoke Ling, Legal Advisor – Third World Network
Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director – Indigenous Environmental Network
Beverley Wright, Director – Deep South Center for Environmental Justice [U.S.]
2. Partnerships for People, or for Profits?
Will Jo’burg Summit become ‘Doha-plus-10 months’?
Wednesday, 28 August 2002, 2:30 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0073.jpg
Speakers:
Bobby Peek, Director – groundWork; Friends of the Earth, South Africa
Yolanda Kakabadse, President – IUCN / World Conservation Union
Michael Dorsey, Board of Directors – Sierra Club [U.S.]
Tom Crompton, Trade Policy Advisor – World Wide Fund for Nature
3. Who Will Feed the World in the 21st Century?
Farmers growing food sustainably? Or corporations supplying GM commodities?
Thursday, 29 August 2002, 2:30 P.M.
[facilitated by IPSA]
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0100.jpg
Speakers:
Percy Schmeiser, Farmer – Canada
Terje Traavik, Director – Norwegian Institute for Gene Ecology
Lucy Mulenkei, Director – Indigenous Information Network [Kenya]
Vicki Tauli-Corpuz, Executive Director – Tebtebba Foundation [Philippines]
Pat Mooney, Executive Director – ETC Group [Canada]
Tom Forster, Consultant – International Partners for Sustainable Agriculture
4. Jo’burg Week One Wrap-Up: NGOs Analyze the State of the Summit
Friday, 30 August 2002, 2:30 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0184.jpg
Speakers:
Remi Parmentier, Political Director – Greenpeace International
Meena Raman, Legal Advisor – Friends of the Earth, Malaysia
Bjarne Pedersen, Senior Policy Officer – Consumers International
Victor Menotti, Environmental Project Director – International Forum on Globalization
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5. Youth Challenge to Global Leaders: “What World Will We Inherit?”
Sunday, 1 September 2002, 2:30 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0244.jpg
Speakers:
Yvonne Khamati – Africa Youth Forum [Kenya]
Nathan Wyeth – Sierra Student Coalition [U.S.]
Afifa Raihana – UNEP Youth Advisory Council [Bangladesh]
Caterina Abreu – World Youth Alliance [Portugal]
Fikile Mbalula – ANC Youth League [South Africa]
6. Framing Week Two: Will Governments Abandon the Earth and its People?
Sunday, 1 September 2002, 3:00 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0245.jpg
Speakers:
Jerry Brown, Mayor – City of Oakland [former Governor, California]
Tony Juniper, Vice Chair – Friends of the Earth International
Vandana Shiva, Director – NAVDANYA Foundation [India]
Steve Sawyer, Climate Director – Greenpeace International
Rudolf Amenga-Etego, Director – Integrated Social Development Center [Uganda]
7. EARTH: Either You’re With It, or You’re Against It
Wednesday, 4 September 2002, 2:00 P.M.
http://www.un.org/events/wssd/photos/0481.jpg
Speakers:
Jennifer Morgan, Climate Director – WWF
Meena Raman, Legal Advisor – Third World Network
Fred Kalibwani, Advisor – PELUM [Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Assoc, Kenya]
Andrew Hewett, Executive Director – Oxfam International [Australia]
June Zeitlin, Executive Director – Women’s Environment and Development Organization
Tony Juniper, Vice Chair – Friends of the Earth International
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