UNITED NATIONS: The international community has fallen short of promises to prevent deterioration of the global environment, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday. Annan said in a 69-page report released here. ”The state of the world’s environment is still fragile and conservation measures are far from satisfactory.”

“In some respects, conditions are actually worse (now) than they were 10 years ago,” Annan noted. The study was released on Monday to coincide with the start of two-week preparatory talks for the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), scheduled to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from Aug 26 to Sept 4.

Kenny Bruno, UN Project Coordinator for the US-based NGO CorpWatch, said that one of the primary reasons for poor implementation following the Earth Summit was the failure to confront the growing power of multinational corporations.

“That power resulted in corporate-led globalization that sidelined Agenda 21,” the document that embodied the Earth Summit pledges, he said. As a result, he said, the environmental agenda became subservient to trade and investment rules, rather than the other way around.

Freshwater is becoming scarcer in many countries due to agriculture, which accounts for 70 per cent of consumption. Only 30 per cent of the water supplied is actually used by plants and crops - the remainder is wasted.

More than 11,000 species are now considered threatened and 800 have already become extinct due to loss of habitats. Another 5,000 species are potentially threatened unless efforts are taken to reverse their population declines, the study said.

About one-quarter of the world’s fisheries are over-fished and half are fully utilised. Marine catches from the Atlantic Ocean and in some parts of the Pacific Ocean reached their maximum potential years ago. Only one per cent of the world’s oceans are protected reserves.

The study also said that natural forests are being converted to agriculture and other land. The rate of global deforestation during the 1990s is estimated at 14.6 million hectares per year, a net loss of four per cent of the world’s forests in the last decade, mostly in developing countries. Net deforestation rates were highest in Africa and South America. —Dawn/InterPress Service