WASHINGTON: As world leaders gather near Johannesburg for next week’s World Summit on Sustainable Development, two major issues have already begun to dominate the agenda: water and genetically modified (GM) food — especially corn.

In both issues, the United States, represented by Secretary of State Colin Powell, will be heavily outnumbered in the conference debates.

For instance, the business-minded Washington administration believes that water is a resource, and like any resource — such as oil — the market will best determine the price and distribution of the product.

That philosophy will be confronted by others — mainly Third World countries — which say access to drinking water is a human right — not a resource. Therefore, goes their argument, a way must be found to get water to the people who can’t pay the going market rates.

Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, two activists on the issue, wrote in the Nation magazine, “The earth’s fresh water is finite and small, representing less that one half of one per cent of the world’s total water stock. Not only are we adding 85 million new people to the planet every year, but our per-capita use of water is doubling every 20 years, at more than twice the rate of human population growth.”

It is not only in Africa or South Asia that the water shortage has become a major economic and political issue. The American Midwest has been suffering from a four-year drought. Farms are literally drying up and blowing away.

Then, too, there is a nasty trans-border dispute with Mexico. The United States claims that Mexico has been overdrawing its share of water resources. The Mexico, for its part, says the Americans are depleting ground water reserves by creating such frivolities as lush, green golf courses in the middle of deserts.

The water dispute will not be settled in Johannesburg, but the lines will be more clearly drawn for the necessary political decisions to be made in national capitals.

The dispute over genetically modified food — especially corn — is going to be just as nasty.

The United States, backed by the world’s largest producers of GM agricultural products, says such crops are safe — Americans have been eating them without harm for years — and effective against insects and plant diseases.

Some southern African countries like Zimbabwe have refused to accept donated American food shipments, even though their people are on the brink of starvation. Some of the Africans say they believe the modified products are toxic. The U.S. government, in a word, says “nonsense”.

But the Africans, and the Europeans, say there is a further unknowable danger in the “super” foods. The modified genes could be spread to other plants, and nobody knows what the impact would be.

Could they produce “super weeds” or “super bugs” that could devastate existing crops? The Americans say no, that the experience in the United States has been that GM crops are safe and reduce the use of expensive and dangerous pesticides and herbicides.

The Americans say the Africans are being prodded into the GM debate by the European Union, the chief American competitor in the global agricultural export trade. The Americans say the European Union is more interested in promoting its own exports than in protecting Africans and others from imaginary dangers.

Thus, as has happened in other recent global conferences, the high-minded intentions will, to some extent, be thwarted by arguments about national interests and political philosophies.

What is different this time — as can be seen by any of the delegates who take a five-minute drive from the posh conference site — is that poverty in southern Africa is dire and getting worse, with sufficient food and clean water a receding dream for many Africans.—Dawn/dpa