The bubble-and-squeak summit

摘要

Some Britons are fond of a dish made by mashing and heating the remnants of previous meals. The mysterious repast known as bubble-and-squeak is not haute cuisine, but it is good in parts. Much the same might be said of the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development that closed this week. Almost everything on the menu at Johannesburg had been served up before, at one conference or another. Thus, development targets were rehashed from a turn-of-the-millennium meeting in New York. "New" aid packages from rich countries proved to be warmed-up pledges first made at a fi-nance-for-development bash held in Monterrey, Mexico, this year. On the side, talks on market access and farm subsidies reconfirmed promises on freeing trade that were made at talks in Doha, Qatar, last year. The main green "successes" were unilateral declarations of support for a protocol on greenhouse gases that was drawn up in Kyoto in 1997. The UN man in charge of the summit, Nitin Desai, says all this was to the good. The official meeting of 21,000 delegates was not supposed to raise big new issues, but rather to consider well-known problems and find practical ways to solve them. Delegates, presidents and spin-doctors queued up to say the meeting was about "actions not words", "starting a new era of implementation" and "creating partnerships". The Rio environment summit ten years ago produced a well-received final declaration, but little of substance followed. Clare Short, Britain's development minister, says the reverse is true, on both counts, of this year's talks.