Negotiators agree on crucial issues at Earth Summit

Johannesburg (Agence France-presse): Negotiators at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg made "significant progress" on Wednesday on a blueprint to save the planet, Danish Environment Minister Hans Christian Schmidt told journalists.

That included a key deal to restore the world's fisheries to their maximum sustainable yield by 2015, the United Nations said.

Schmidt said the marathon talks carried on behind closed doors into the early hours of Wednesday, with significant progress achieved on development aid for the Third World and on global trade.

A UN announcement on the fisheries agreement but gave no details of how it would be achieved.

It added that agreement was also reached on text calling for the needs of developing countries to be taken into consideration in the allocation of fishing quotas.

"This agreement provides us with the crucial underpinning for government action," said the Earth Summit's secretary general, Nitin Desai.

"Overfishing cannot continue. The depletion of fisheries poses a major threat to the food supply of millions of people. This agreement recognizes that we need coordinated action between governments, fishermen, communities and industry."

"We have advanced a lot on finance but much less on trade," a senior European official told AFP.

Antiguan ambassador to the United Nations John Ashe said 99 percent of the text. on financial issues and between 80 and 90 percent on international trade had been agreed.

The negotiators are trying to marry economic growth and the takeoff of developing countries with protection of the environment.

Ashe said the European Union (EU), the United States and the G-77 developing nations were ready to reaffirm their commitment to World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements reached in Doha in November last year, but he stressed that the question of farm subsidies was proving to be an obstacle.

According to the World Bank, subsidies to farmers in Europe and the United States total nearly US$1 billion a day, seriously undermining the lot of producers in developing countries and creating an "unsustainable" situation for both rich and poor countries.

Meanwhile the hosts of the 1972, 1992 and 2002 Earth conferences ON Wednesday said Johannesburg must end with "an action-oriented implementation plan with clear targets and timetables" to attain the twin objectives of poverty eradication and environment protection.

In a joint article published in the International Herald Tribune, Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and South African President Thabo Mbeki said the action plan should have commitments to implement the UN Millennium Development Goals.

The goals include access to water, sanitation, energy, health care and food security.

Experts at the Earth Summit on Wednesday called for urgent action to provide clean water and decent sanitation for billions of the world's poor and to deflect looming tensions over shared resources.

A global development group on Wednesday warned of potentially "apocalyptic" outcome if the Earth Summit fails to give priority to managing rapid urbanization and growing poverty in cities.

According to UN estimates, cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America are expanding by one million people weekly and most of them are society's poor, living in slums and unplanned settlements, said Care International UK.

Recent research by the nongovernmental organization, which has a network in some 70 countries, found regular discrimination against poorer urban dwellers by the authorities, and this growing number of marginalised poor people could intensify social tensions, said Care director Will Day.

In another development, a motley parade of street traders and former South African soldiers marched on the UN Earth Summit in Johannesburg on Wednesday. as police tried to ward off a far bigger protest planned for Saturday.

Some 200 South African hawkers and farmers, flanked by police in full riot gear, demanded free trade and said authorities had robbed street sellers of their income by removing them from the suburb of Sandton, where the summit is taking place.