BALI (Indonesia) The failure of a preparatory meeting for the upcoming Johannesburg Earth Summit to resolve the key issue — who foots the bill for the related issues of environmental protection and easing poverty — has left a mighty task for the next three months.

The two-week fourth preparatory meeting in Bali, which ended Friday, had the chief task of finalizing a so-called “Bali Commitment” to be used as a foundation for a second Earth Summit, scheduled for August 26 to September 4 in Johannesburg.

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, while lofty in its goals, proved poor in performance, with global poverty and environmental conditions worsening by some measures over the past 10 years.

It is widely acknowledged that the weakness of the Rio summit was its failure to set strict targets and timetables for the world community, allowing many rich nations to backtrack on vague commitments while many developing countries have gotten poorer, partly due to a series of financial and economic crises affecting much of Asia, South America and Africa.

The upcoming Johannesburg summit now faces massive obstacles to committing developed countries - the only ones who can realistically pick up the global environmental bill - to put their money where their mouths are.

The G77 stressed repeatedly at the Bali meeting that sustainable development will not be possible without firmer commitments from the developed countries in terms of aid, more access to markets for their exports and technical cooperation.

Led by the United States, the wealthy-nation bloc stood firm in maintaining that Bali and the Earth Summit were not the proper forums for breakthroughs on trade and finance issues for development, which have recently been covered by the Doha WTO Ministerial Declaration in November and the Monterrey Consensus in March.

As a result, Bali saw a breakdown rather than a breakthrough, at least on key money issues.

“The meeting has failed to reach a compromise on essential issues to time-bound measures,” said Bali preparatory meeting chairman Emil Salim. “It also failed to reach a consensus to highlight the principle of common by differential responsibility.”

While the meeting claimed to have cleared up nearly 80 per cent of the debated points in the so-called action plan, nearly the entirety of Chapter 9 on “means for implementation” — in other words, who pays — will be sent on to Johannesburg as still up for discussion.

Some progress was made in reaching a consensus in areas such as poverty eradication, changing consumption and production patterns, protecting the environment and establishing business partnerships in sustainable development, a U.S. initiative that the Americans were proud to have pushed through.

But even in these areas, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) bemoaned the lack of fixed timetables and targets in the half- finished Bali Commitment.

NGOs have seen the Bali bust as an opportunity to mobilize civil society to pressure their governments between now and the upcoming summit in Johannesburg for establishing a real action plan for the next 10 years that will achieve substantial results.

“No deal is better than a bad deal,” said Remi Parmentier, political director of Greenpeace. “Millions of people are going to die if we do not do get a good, strong action plan. Too many people have forgotten that sustainable development is about saving lives.”

While there is hope that European Union leadership, which has shown a willingness in Bali to be flexible over trade and finance issues, will consolidate its stance between now and the September Earth Summit, there is much less optimism that the US, Canada and Australia — derided as the “filthy three” — will change their tune.

So far, US President George Bush has not committed to attending the Johannesburg Earth Summit. His father, George Bush, who was U.S. president in 1992, decided to attend the Rio Earth Summit only four days before the event.

Some are hoping that the younger Bush’s “war on terrorism” bodes well for his participation in Johannesburg.

“Poverty alleviation and environment degradation are key issues to global security,” said Matt Philipps of Friends Of the Earth, a pressure group. “Bush is going to have to address these issues if he wants to succeed in his war on terrorism.”—Dawn/dpa