August 27, 2002	Tuesday	Jamadi-us-Saani 17,1423

JOHANNESBURG: The real level of world inequality and environmental degradation may be far worse than official estimates, according to a leaked document prepared for the world’s richest countries and seen by the Guardian.

It includes new estimates that the world lost almost 10 per cent of its forests a year in the last 10 years; that carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming are expected to rise by 33 per cent in rich countries and 100 per cent in the rest of the world in the next 18 years; and that more than 30 per cent more fresh water will be needed by 2020.

The background paper for last month’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development pre-Johannesburg meeting on sustainable development draws on many previously unseen UN, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, and academic papers.

Although the governments of the world’s 22 richest nations who make up the OECD have seen the document, many of the calculations are new and considerably different from their own.

It calculates that less than 0.1 per cent of the average income of the 22 members of the OECD actually finds its way to the world’s low income countries and just 0.05 per cent went to the least developed countries. Recent US and EU initiatives, it says, “will not meet targets at any time soon”.

Donor assistance for environmental protection and basic social services have declined to less than 15 per cent of all aid compared to 35 per cent at the time of the last earth summit in 1992.

The OECD paper calculates that rich countries now subsidise their industries by up to US dollars 1,000m a year, including more than US dollars 300 billion in agriculture. This, it says, is having increasing effects on the development of poor countries. and on environmental degradation.

If unrestricted market access were given to just the four richest economies in the world, it would increase per capita incomes of more than two billion people in the world’s most populated countries by 4 per cent a year.

Meanwhile, the paper finds that foreign assistance from western European countries, including private funding and direct investment encouraged through national policies, was more globally oriented in 1900 than it is today.

It says that if the EU, Canada, Japan and the US allowed migrants to make up 4 per cent of their workforce, the returns to poor countries could be $160-200bn a year — far more than any debt relief could provide.

The paper’s calculations of environmental degradation suggest the many conventions, treaties and intergovernmental agreements signed in the past decade have had little or no effect on stopping the rush for timber and mineral resources in the developing world and that extinction of species is now reaching 11 per cent of birds, 18-24 per cent of mammals, 5 per cent of fish, and 8 per cent of plants.

Over the next 18 years, says the report, global energy use is expected to expand by more than 50 per cent, and by more than 100 per cent in China, east Asia and the former Soviet Union. Transport is by then expected to account for more than half of global oil demand.

“The non-renewable fossil fuel resource base is expected to be sufficient to meet demand to 2020 though problems beyond that point are foreseen for natural gas and possibly oil,” says the report.

It adds that OECD countries subsidise the emission of global warming gases by US dollars 57 billion — almost exactly what the report estimates it would cost to meet international targets. The paper suggests that investing the money in reducing climate change emissions would have next to no effect on the global economy. “Through the provision of subsidies [on fossil fuels] governments are effectively subsidising pollution and global warming as more than 60 per cent of all subsidies flow to oil, coal and gas.”

Environment and development groups on Sunday reacted to the report with horror.

“The rich world knows this happening. We in poor countries have always known the climate is changing, aid does not come, and the poor are getting poorer. The richest countries are here in Johannesburg to keep the system going”, said the chair of Friends of the Earth International, Ricardo Navarrez. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.