From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Earth Summit: World Leaders get "Ostrich Prize"
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 08:23:15 GMT

/** gen.newsletter: 136.2 **/
** Written  5:40 pm  Aug 27, 1992 by ecologycntr in cdp:gen.newsletter **

For the Earth Summit, world leaders  congealed in Rio like blood drying
on an open wound. The reports from the mainstream corporate media
coming out of Rio were mixed: they ranged from hopeful observations
that at least the leaders were meeting about environment and development
as connected issues, and beginning to talk about solutions, to
disappointed reflections that the governments were completely
failing to make any serious commitments to deal with impending
ecological catastrophes.

Most of the establishment reporters were making a fundamental
mistake. Thinking that the governments of the world are going to
look honestly for new, progressive and innovative ways to address
our ecological crises is like expecting the American Medical
Association and the medical insurance industry to deal honestly
with the health care crisis in the United States. Like these two
bureaucracies, the national governments are stuck in the paradigm
of greed, growth and more technology as the solution to any and
all problems.

A special award, the Ostrich Prize, was given by a group of
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to the governments that had
the worst performance at the Summit. NGOs are considered by the
United Nations to be organizations that are not government, even
including the International Chamber of Commerce.  The NGOs that
were giving this award, however, were grassroots community
organizations and non-profit organizations like the Northern
Peoples' Alliance for the Environment, Forum of Brazilian NGOs,
Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, etc. At first the NGOs were
looking for constructive actions by governments, but, finding
none, they came up with the Ostrich Prize. The United States,
represented by George Bush, won top honors by undermining
virtually all the initiatives on climate change, biodiversity,
biotechnology, models of consumption, weapons of mass destruction
and elimination of nuclear waste. Saudi Arabia came in second for
opposing development of renewable energy sources and energy
efficiency, having a destructive attitude in the contact group on
the atmosphere and climate, and cooperating with regressive
industrial groups. Americans might want to remember this award as
we spend billions of dollars to protect the oil interests in the
Mideast.

By being the only country out of 172 not to sign the Biodiversity
Treaty, the US. showed how much corporations are calling its
shots. In Rio Bush claimed the treaty would be too costly, but
that wasn't the real reason. According to an article in the San
Francisco Chronicle on June 12, "The biotechnology and
pharmaceutical industries have been a driving force behind the
administration's unpopular position." Genentech's chief executive
G. Kirk Raab minced no words. In a letter to Bush he declared that
the biodiversity treaty "runs the chance of eroding the progress
made in protecting American intellectual property rights." The
concern over biodiversity for corporations is to protect their
"right" to own the DNA sequences of life. The biotechnology and
pharmaceutical industries are only interested in preserving
biological diversity long enough to discover, extract and learn to
replicate DNA sequences for corporate profit. Once they have
stolen genetic information from traditional peoples and figured
out how to reconstruct those DNA sequences in their laboratories
to make products at a profit, they will want to eliminate
biodiversity from the natural world. For then, they will own all
the patents on genetic materials, giving them exclusive
"intellectual property rights." They will make even more profit
because they will be the only ones manufacturing products based on
genetic resources that will no longer exist in the natural world.
The next frontier for corporate conquest has become life itself.

Some positive things happened in Rio, but not many at the official
Earth Summit. The NGOs had a parallel meeting called the '92
Global Forum where over 17,500 registrants representing thousands
of institutions from 167 countries met to address many of the
problems causing excess suffering on and with the Earth. The forum
was a physical, philosophical and political space created for
people, representing civil society (as opposed to government
officials). The aim was to envision a world that is more just,
more equitable and more secure. Unfortunately "poor" people didn't
get to have much input into this process because they were absent.
I read in preliminary documents about the Global Forum that
attempts were being made to fund people that couldn't afford to
attend. Apparently that didn't happen.

The Gloria Hotel served as HQ for the "Alternative Summit".
Adjacent to the hotel was Flamengo Park, with 35 temporary meeting
structures and 600 displays by various exhibitors.

During the forum the NGOs finalized over 30 treaties to sign. The
treaty making process was designed for NGOs to reach agreements on
actions that they were prepared to carry out in their own
communities.

Because I was working in the area of communication I decided to
work on the Communication Treaty. Communication turned out to be a
major obstacle in working on the Communication Treaty. The group
of people who attempted to work together on the treaty spoke many
different languages. As English was the language that the majority
of the people could understand and speak, we used English as our
language of negotiation. This upset the people from Northern
Africa who spoke French, not English. They left the meeting. There
was nothing we could do since the forum was under-funded, with a
limited number of translators.

The other major frustration within the group was between those who
wanted to produce a treaty and those who preferred to work on
action plans for communication and networking instead. The treaty
people wanted a treaty that would provide NGOs a method for
insuring the right to communicate. The result was a treaty called
the Communication, Information, Media and Networking Treaty. It
laid out a set of agreements on communication as well as specific
commitments for the NGOs that signed it. I agreed to sign the
treaty after presenting it to the Neahtawanta Center board of
directors on June 21 for approval. Many aspects of the treaty fit
with the goals of the Neahtawanta Center that address
communication nodes and information exchange. Here are the opening
paragraphs of the Treaty:

The right to communicate freely is a basic human right and a
necessity for sustainable development. Access to information is
essential for informed decision-making at all levels. As Chapter
40 of Agenda 21 declares, "in sustainable development, everyone is
a user and provider of information considered in the broad sense
that includes data, information, appropriately packaged experience
and knowledge."

The "Green Press" International Meeting of Journalists on
Environment and Development (Belo Horizonte, May 20-24, 1992)
identified as threats to democratic communication: unequal access
to the media, the concentration of information resources in the
hands of economic groups, censorship and other forms of government
control.

Governments and international institutions should guarantee the
right of all people to communicate, to collect, to put in proper
shape, to disseminate and to exchange all information they choose
without any risk to personal security. People should have the
material and cultural means, including the basic mail and
telephone facilities, to communicate with colleagues locally and
globally. Unfortunately, in many Southern countries, these
facilities are deteriorating.

The problem of deteriorating communication facilities stems from
privatization. This is happening in Southern countries where the
governments are paying off foreign debts by selling parts of their
public infrastructure, such as the telephone service. This creates
different levels of access to communication between those who can
afford to purchase the service once it is in the private sector
and those who cannot. In addition, some Southern countries'
governments are loaned money by official northern lending
institutions for improving the high-tech infrastructures for
communication that benefit the banks and multi-national
corporations, while the postal service deteriorates, again
creating unequal access to information between the haves and the
have-nots.

In this country the wave of privatization will have the same
effect of further widening the gap between the haves and the have
nots. This division is widening in most places on the Earth as the
majority of governments in the world are in some stage of crisis a
crisis of authority and leadership. The NGOs' main message from
the Global Forum is for communities everywhere to strengthen or
create participatory democracies and to honor diversity. As one
sign read at a protest march in Rio: "No Environment without
Democracy."

The deterioration of the planet will continue to escalate for some
time yet: the turnaround is not in sight, not in my eyes anyway.
It makes one wonder really what is the right thing to be doing. Is
it working on a vision of the future and how you would like to see
the world healed? Or working to stop the current destruction of
the planet by the corporate multi-national governments? Or do you
work on both? And is there energy to work on both? One is really a
battle in defense of Earth, the other is about changing yourself
and your community, but they are inseparably related.

Perhaps if the NGOs of the world had the time, the resources, the
skills and the communication links, strategies could unfold. The
Global Forum was an attempt at such a meeting. Was it successful?
I don't think any one person knows the answer. Perhaps in a few
years we will see real progress as a result of the meeting, but
nothing will happen quickly.

Tom Princen, an assistant professor of International Environmental
Policy at the University of Michigan, compared this global
movement of NGOs to what happened in Eastern Europe. He contends
that before things broke loose there, a social movement of people
existed who were planning for the future after their governments
collapsed. This movement and the coming collapse was invisible to
the CIA, the KGB, universities' studies, the think tanks and the
mainstream media. To learn about this movement you would have had
to look hard in the alternative media and underground press. The
same may be true of the global civic society forming a new vision
around the issue of sustainable development. As I look at the
stories in the mainstream press about the events in Rio, the
Global Forum is almost absent from their coverage; yet that is
where the hope for a sustainable future may emerge for life on
Earth.

The Global Forum was not everything it wanted to be, but it was a
cause for hope. People from around the world, working together,
began to envision a more sustainable future.


This article was first printed in Synapse, a quarterly newsletter
of the Neahtawanta Research and Education Center, 1308 Neahtawanta
Rd., Traverse City, MI 49684,  (616) 223-7315 email
neahtawanta@igc.apc.org.  Reprinted by permission of the author.

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