TWN Update on Sustainable Development Conference 2012 (Feb12/02)
23 February 2012
Third World Network

Dear friends and colleagues,

The ongoing meeting of the UNEP Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi has a session on the preparations for Rio+20. We are happy to share with you the statement of the Bolivian delegation made on 20 February.

With best wishes,
Third World Network

STATEMENT OF THE PLURINATIONAL STATE OF BOLIVIA
AT 12TH SPECIAL SESSION OF THE GOVERNING COUNCIL / GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT MINISTERS FORUM OF THE UNEP
(Complete Version. Nairobi, Kenya, 20 February 2012)

The delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia wishes to express its recognition of the advances that UNEP has made in the consolidation of various initiatives under sustainable development.

We are at a crucial time for defining the future of our planet. In our hands and our conscience is the responsibility to decide which way we will continue to ensure the eradication of poverty, distribution and redistribution of wealth, creation and strengthening of our material and spiritual conditions to live well in harmony with nature, and of course, respect the rights of Mother Earth.

This historic moment is essential because we will write the history of the path to development and the documents that express this path will be adopted at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June this year, called Rio +20.

The challenge of leading the world toward sustainable development requires a vision of the foundations on which social, environmental and economic express themselves interdependent and complementary, and we propose measures, clear objectives, priorities, goals and institutional structures and funding to resolve social inequity, poverty and hunger afflicting billions of people worldwide.

Our view of nature and the social pillar can not be economistic or financial; our view of the economy must be environmentalist, social and humanistic. Therefore, we propose to live well in harmony with nature as the heart of our vision of development. Our view of nature and human beings are, together, expressed in the concept of Mother Earth. Humans are also part of Mother Earth; we are human-social-natural.

We do not share the view of nature as "natural capital “or as "Stock of natural wealth". This view leads to erroneously assume that investment in this, called "capital" or "stock", will lead to solve socio-economic problems. Precisely the pattern of current production and consumption is based on this vision and has led to extractive actions of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources with serious environmental and social damage, beyond the limits of the biocapacity of regeneration of nature.

We believe that the analysis proposed by UNEP as part of the green economy in the sense that the global crisis is caused by a gross misallocation of capital that would have been concentrated on property, fossil fuels and financial stocks, is inadequate and misleading. The global crisis has, in our opinion, as structural causes, among others, the following: 1) accumulation and concentration of wealth in few countries, 2) accumulation and concentration of wealth in small privileged social groups, 3) concentration of capital in production-marketing resources and assets of high and rapid generation of wealth, 4) promotion of social mass consumption of products with the belief that having more is better live, 5) mass production of disposable products to enrich capital, increasing the ecological footprint, 6) production with excessive and unsustainable extraction of natural resources renewable and nonrenewable, with high environmental costs, 7) concentration of capital in financial speculation to generate quick and significant profits, 8) excessive indebtedness of the public and social sphere with benefit of finance capital; 9) conversion of the populations in subjects of high and mass consume; 10) concentration of knowledge and technologies in rich countries and rich and powerful social groups, 11) extraction of the maximum amount of economic and legal benefits of public-state for the enjoyment of small private groups investors; 12) promotion of financial practices and extractive production schemes / trade deteriorate the economy and sovereignty of the states (in particular in developing countries) to monopolize control of resources and income; 13) reducing the role of States with weak regulatory systems, making the private investors the owners of the house and the State and peoples servers or weak partners with the myth that foreign investment solves everything.

A wasteful, consumerist civilization generating wealth in few hands and poverty has been set thrrough this pattern. This is the pattern of production/consumption that we must transform.

The effects of this pattern are: 1) the creation of a global system of poor countries and rich countries, 2) the creation of a system where there are few rich very rich and many poor very poor, 3) Severe social inequity, 4) environmental crisis characterized by the climate crisis, pollution, severe damage to nature and its ecosystems, 5) food crisis characterized by the growing population of poor and hungry in the world with little access to food resources and to nutritious food, 6) financial crisis; 7) deterioration of productive systems and indigenous peasant community rich in nutritious food production; 8) concentration of food production in large agribusiness producers with high dependence on agricultural technology packages.

This crisis is not resolved by relocating the capital and redirecting investments toward what UNEP calls Natural Capital (understood as: forestry, agriculture, water and fisheries) and particularly to the 10 sectors that they proposed, namely: Agriculture, Buildings, Energy, Fisheries, Forestry, Industry, Tourism, Transport, Waste and Water.

The belief that improvement of human welfare and social equity will be done only or mainly by the way of redirecting and increasing investment in natural capital and eliminating the so-called "perverse incentives of the market" for natural capital is erroneous. It is not adequate to supplant human values with efficiency of investment.

It is not investment per se or the orientation of this that will resolve the crisis. We are concerned that this direction of thought ends up reducing the sustainable development to an economic vision, no matter how green it appears to be.

In the table in Annex 1 of the document entitled "Toward a Green Economy…" proposed by UNEP and cited as the basis of analysis for this event in paragraph 8 of document UNEP/GCSS.XII/13/Add.1, we observe the so called 10 strategic sectors. The hypothesis that arises is that to achieve sustainable development is essential the location of investment in these 10 sectors. After reviewing the proposal, we note that of these 10 sectors, 5 are related to actions of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and 5 correspond to what they call natural capital. That is, 5 sectors are linked to what is called Climate Mitigation in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These 5 sectors according to the chart, considering what they call future investment needs, account for 86% of total planned investments as necessary, that is 2.2 trillion dollars, equivalent to 2.8% of global GDP for 2015. However, investment in natural capital represents only 14% of the total planned as necessary. This implies the belief that to overcome poverty and social inequality, investment in climate mitigation could play a determinant role, that is why an assignation of 86% of total investments is suggested to be applied.

Mr. President, we disagree with this view. Mitigation actions resolve part of a component of the global crisis, the climate crisis, certainly an important component, but only one component. However, the other dimensions of the crisis are still pending as the food crisis, financial crisis, the crisis of the deterioration of nature, the social crisis of poverty expressed in the gap between rich and poor.

With this "climate of sustainable development approach", which is part of the approach of green economy, we reduce substantially our understanding of the global crisis and sustainable development.

Moreover, in this way it is created a set of implications that do not resolve the issue of sustainable development:

1. Reduction of investment in sustainable developing to mitigation sectors.
2. Substantially restricts the Official Development Assistance (ODA) to mitigate climate reducing drastically the social pillar.
3. Transform funding commitments made for climate mitigation under the United Nations Conference on Climate Change into requirements and financial solutions to poverty, inequality and sustainable development.
4. It gets worse one of the central problems in the debate of the UN conference on climate change related to the imbalance between funding for adaptation and mitigation, encouraging more than 86% of financing to go to mitigation.
5. Create confusion about global funds for climate change by facilitating conditions for these to replace the Official Development Assistance (ODA) in contradiction with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that states that climate change funding has to be new and additional respect to Official Development Assistance.
6. Facilitates to provide the funding that rich countries use for their own mitigation actions, and make them appear as funding to help overcome poverty in the context of sustainable development.
7. Substantially reduce funding for poor countries providing the bulk of the funding to be concentrated in rich countries, developed or large emitters or in mitigation sectors that favor them.

Mr. President, we believe that, in contrast, a proposal on Sustainable Development should be based on the Living in Harmony with Nature, considering the following:

1. A set of principles that make up an Ethics of Sustainability based on environmental solidarity between human beings and complementarity with nature, build Collective Responsibility Social Equity and Environmental Justice.
2. The investment must be guided by a sense of ethics and an ethic of sustainability, on the transformative power of social and environmental human welfare.
3. The goods of nature are that not because they have been calculated in a monetary manner, but because they have an environmental value, human value, cultural and living conditions values.
4. Natural goods and investments in nature should not serve as a means of domination.
5. We must establish an Environmental Justice System based on an ethic of edifying virtues that promote solidarity, complementarity, humanist virtues that are recreated in the mother earth, rights of nature prevailing over greed, profit, arrogance and exclusion .
6. The investment must be dignifiying and humane, in the context of an ethics and environmental justice.
7. The investment should be guided by a framework of ethical standards, promoting respect and exercise of the rights of nature, the rights of Mother Earth, human rights, social and cultural rights.
8. The development must be based on an approach of rights and duties and the full realization of the happiness of people, peoples and populations, through the enforcement of the rights of peoples, persons, states and Mother Earth, in a comprehensive, complementary way.
9. To achieve comprehensive development, complementary and supportive to Live Well it needs a "new international economic order" based on principles of equality, national sovereignty, common interests, harmony with nature, cooperation and solidarity between states and peoples, changes in patterns of consumption and production as part of the redistribution of wealth.
10. It should eliminate obstacles to full self-determination and sovereignty of peoples, nations and states to make progress on the path to sustainable development according to their own cultural views and their economic and social reality, in the context of the rights of the mother earth.
11. The gap between the rich and the poor has to be drastically reduced allowing the poor to have access to the means, resources and appropriate conditions for living well. Quantified targets should be set to that effect to be completed within a specified period.
12. Living Well is the access and enjoyment of material and spiritual goods and the effective realization of the happiness in the subjective, cultural, spiritual and communitarian dimension in harmony with nature and human community.
13. Integrated management and sustainable use of natural resources is aimed at meeting the economic needs of the peoples and states while ensuring the regeneration of living systems, ie, respecting the rights of Mother Earth and mainly to the life, diversity of life, preservation of water cycles, clean air, balance, restoration, and a life free of contamination.
14. It is recognized that indigenous peoples have been implemented through the centuries several alternatives for sustainable development through the implementation of low-level models of consumption, therefore is important to advance in the recognition and guarantees of the rights of indigenous peoples.
15. Developed countries should provide new and additional financial resources, stable and predictable to support the implementation of plans and actions for sustainable development of developing countries.
16. The main challenge of sustainable development in the future is to achieve each country overcome the challenge of food security to food sovereignty and right to food as a dimension of poverty eradication. Progress is needed in building a comprehensive and articulator process of feeding the peoples in the context of "Feed Well to Live Well", which is to ensure that all countries have the capabilities, conditions and balances to ensure the production, access and consumption of adequate food and the means to obtain it in the context of food sovereignty, respecting the cultural views of their populations, promoting the economy of small peasant farmers and indigenous native and family and community in a sustainable and agro ecological way in harmony with Mother Earth.

Mr. President. We welcome the progress and proposals of UNEP, of the countries and groups of countries here, every effort of analyze and propose is welcome, but we consider that the proposal raised with the name of Green Economy as we have observed and analyzed does not help solve the global crisis .

Distinguished colleagues we intend to work hard and quickly in the context of a broader civil society participation, with the leading role of indigenous peoples and peoples of the world, in developing a vision for living well in harmony with nature. You have our hands open to offer our proposals in this global community effort for the success of the Conference of Rio + 20, for the sake of our people, our daughters and sons, our mother earth.

Thank you very much.