Summit warned of planet's future as protests mount

Johannesburg, South Africa (Agence France-Presse): The biggest conference on the Earth's future got off to a sombre start in Johannesburg on Monday with warnings that the planets ability to sustain human life is shrinking while most of its six billion people are mired in poverty.

On the other side of the city, hundreds of angry African farmers and subsistence fishermen demonstrated in protest at their dwindling access to the land and over their depleted catches, a result of overfishing by industrial trawlers.

Twelve Greenpeace (ii'tivists were charged with breaching security at Africa's only nuclear power plant after taking inflatable boats to the facility near Cape Town at the weekend, scaling a building and unfurling anti-nuclear banners. They appear in court again on Friday.

Mustering thousands of people, the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development kicked off to appeals for action on alleviating poverty and protecting the environment.

"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," warned South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is chairing the summit.

But, he said, "for the first time in human history, human society possesses the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty and underdevelopment".

The 104 heads of state and government who have said they will attend the summit's climax Sept. 2-4 must produce a political declaration that is "an honest pledge" for change, Mbeki urged.

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

Scientists have a long catalog 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.

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.

Diplomats from more than 30 key countries met behind closed doors over the weekend in a bid to bridge the differences.

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.

Britain wants agreement on a declaration committing to halve by 2015 the proportion of people lacking access to improved sanitation, a "target for increasing the global share of new or modern renewable energy sources in primary energy supply" and a commitment to ensuring by 2020 that chemicals are produced and used only in environmentally-friendly ways.

This summit is a follow-up to the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which put forward 2,500 recommendations, most of them ignored.

More than 5,700 government delegates are taking part, 4,375 non-governmental delegates are observing the discussions, and 2,560 journalists are reporting them.

Added to are around 20,000 people from corporations and non-governmental organizations, attending seminars, workshops and other meetings.

That turnout reflects how the environment, which only 20 years ago was ignored in global politics, is now firmly established as a mainstream issue.