JOHANNESBURG, Aug 26: The world’s leaders were on Monday urged to seize a unique moment in history to lift billions of people out of poverty and save the planet before its last resources are plundered by a burgeoning population.

“For the first time in human history, human society possesses the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment,” South African President Thabo Mbeki told the opening of the UN Earth Summit.

“Poverty, underdevelopment, inequality within and among countries, together with the worsening global ecological crisis, sum up the dark shadow under which most of the world lives,” he said at the start of the 10-day UN World Summit on sustainable development.

He urged the 104 heads of state and government due to attend the summit’s climax in Johannesburg from Sept 2-4 to cast aside differences and produce a political declaration that is “an honest pledge” for change.

As he was speaking, hundreds of angry African farmers and subsistence fishermen demonstrated at the activists’ Global Forum in protest at their dwindling access to the land and depleted catches, a result of overfishing by industrial trawlers.

And in Rome, the Food and Agriculture Organization warned that 13 million people in southern Africa faced starvation.

According to an FAO report, aid pledged by donor countries adds up to only about 24 per cent of the 507 million dollars needed to feed people in the region until the next major harvest in April. The food situation is of “grave concern”, said the report, which stressed the need for aid to avoid a “large scale humanitarian crisis”.

Security was tight for the summit, which has gathered 5,700 delegates and follows up the Rio Summit exactly 10 years ago, which put forward 2,500 recommendations, most of them ignored.

This summit has also been dogged by accusations that it will amount to little more than hot air.

Diplomats from more than 30 key countries met behind closed doors on Saturday and Sunday in a bid to bridge differences over fair trade, market access for developing nations and timetables for action.

The 71-page action plan the summit is working on is a raft of non-binding recommendations, but is important because it will shape the world’s environment agenda for the next decade.

Because of that, it has become a battleground for squabbling.

It has pitched the United States against Europe over setting a timetable for reaching key development goals, while developing countries are demanding their rich counterparts do more to lower trade tariffs and agricultural subsidies.

Britain will press for targets and timetables to ease global poverty and seek to “persuade” the United States to drop its resistance on the issue, British delegation sources said.

Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said if the world wanted to address its worsening environmental crisis, it could not turn its back on pervasive poverty.

“Our world is characterized by divided and dysfunctional cities, dwindling water supplies and potential conflict over scarce resources and the accelerating loss of the environmental capital that underpins life on Earth,” he said.

Scientists have a long catalogue of evidence about the planet’s environmental problems. They range from vanishing species, deforestation and overfished seas to soil erosion, water pollution and climate change caused by the reckless burning of fossil fuels.

At the same time, as many as two billion of the world’s six billion people have no access to clean water or sanitation or even access to electricity.—AFP