Word: summiteer
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Earlier this year it was hoped that the Earth Summit treaty would include a provision making genetic materials of all kinds the sovereign resource of the originating country. Nations would have control over who had access to their genetic resources, and if someone else found a way to make money from them, the originating country would collect royalties on each sale...
There are scores of other issues -- large and small -- buried in the drafts of two primary Earth Summit texts: a five-page "declaration" and a 600-plus- page "blueprint for action" called Agenda 21. The shorter statement, originally called the Earth Charter, was supposed to be a soaring preamble, along the lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The longer agenda was supposed to specify the problems that the world will face well into the 21st century and how to pay for their solution...
Agarwal's comments reflect a new feistiness among developing countries on environmental matters. A coalition of them, called the Group of 77, has put up a remarkably united front in the Earth Summit talks. Led by Indians and Pakistanis, whose language skills and flair for bureaucratic nitpicking serve them well in parliamentary maneuverings, the G-77 nations have effectively resisted what they see as an effort to make them pay for the industrial world's environmental sins. "We may not have been able to get what we want," says India's Pachauri. "But we can draw satisfaction from the fact...
...world's richest nation and its single biggest polluter -- has stood in the way of progress on many of the most closely watched summit issues. While senior officials held briefings painting the Bush Administration as pro-environment, U.S. delegates backed the status quo on one topic after another, insisting over and over that "the American life-style is not up for negotiation...
...issue in Rio. Some observers think the Group of 77 may have made a tactical blunder by pushing so hard for financial and technical aid. Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the U.N., has called it a "diplomatic mistake of the highest magnitude." Others criticize the Earth Summit organizers, who by putting so many environmental problems on the negotiating table may have inadvertently ensured that none of them get solved...