The World Summit on Sustainable Development organized in Johannesburg from August 26 - September 4, 2002 was supposed to have been the Earth Summit II - ten years after the Earth Summit organized in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Instead of Rio + 10, WSSD became Doha+10. Ten months ago, the Ministerial Meeting of W.T.O. was organized in Doha to salvage the W.T.O. negotiations for a new enlarged round which had failed in Seattle due to citizen protest and a walk out by smaller countries who had been marginalized and excluded in the negotiations. The implementation document of WSSD mentioned Doha and WTO 46 times at one stage and Rio only once. The draft had been introduced undemocratically by the U.S. and E.U., and with minor modifications was reintroduced by South Africa. There was no rebellion by Governments against the surreptitious substitution of the sustainability agenda of Rio with the commercial and corporate agenda of W.T.O.

While the struggles of the poor in the South are related to their access and rights to natural resources -- land, water and biodiversity, and hence are intrinsically environmental and ecological struggles, WSSD was artificially presented as being about `poverty', not abut the `environment'. Globalization was then offered as the solution to poverty, and decisions that were aimed at robbing the poor of their remaining resources and hence making them poorer such as privatisation of water,
patenting of seeds and alienation of land, were being offered as measures for `poverty alleviation'. While the landless people and the movements against privatisation marched for environmental and resource rights, globalization pundits kept repeating the mantra that the poor could not afford the "luxury" of their natural capital -- they needed globalization.

Globalizers do not see that globalization would rob the poor of their resources, make them the property of global corporations who would then sell water and seeds at high cost to the poor thus pushing them deeper into poverty, and over the edge of survival. During PBS/BBC debate in which I participated, industry spokesman clearly said that imposing private property rights to natural resources was their first priority. Globalizing the non-sustainable, unethical, inequitous systems of ownership, control and use of natural resources was the main agenda at WSSD.

The corporate hijack of the Earth summit was the overall outcome WSSD had mutated into W$$D. But the implications go further than the hijack of one summit. These are dangerous trends for democracy. The substitution of multilateral legally binding agreements (Type I outcomes) by so called Type II outcomes in the form of public private partnerships are reflections of the privatization of states and privatization of the U. N. The U. N. of "We the People" was transformed in Johannesburg into the U.N. of "We the Corporations". It appeared to be an auction house where the Earth herself was being put up for sale. For us in civil society the earth and one world is not for sale. That is why we withdrew our consent to the outcomes.

When I had the opportunity to address the opening of the Civil Society forum with President Mbeki, I talked of how a global apartheid was being created by globalization after South Africa had fought its domestic apartheid. President Mbeki made reference to the "global apartheid" in his draft political declaration at the end of the Summit. He had intended to say:  From the African continent, the Cradle of Humanity, we declare our responsibility to one another to the greater community of life, and to future generations. Meeting in the great African city of Johannesburg, which bears testimony to how industrial activity can change the environment in a matter of decades, we recall the great social and economic divides we have seen. This is a mirror of our global existence. If we do nothing, we risk the entrenchment of a form of global apartheid. Unless we act in a manner that fundamentally changes their lives, the poor o the world may lose confidence in the democratic systems to which we are committed seeing their representatives as nothing more than sounding brass or tinkling symbols. The U.S. forced South Africa to change that text and remove all reference to "global apartheid". It thus contributed to the Summit being nothing more than "sounding brass or tinkling symbols."

Only the governments of Norway and Ethiopia spoke up against attempts to make the multilateral environment agreements (MEAs) of Rio subservient to the trade rules of W.T.O. and to dilute the proposals on corporate accountability that the Friends of the Earth campaign had successfully introduced in the text. The only other `victory' was the women's alliance of ministers and the women's caucus preventing the removal of language relating to human rights in the context of health.

In an age supposedly characterized by a clash of civilizations, the "clashing civilizations" -- the U.S., the Holy See, the Islamic countries were amazingly unified in seeing human rights in health as a threat to all shades and colours of patriarchy. The tragedy was that all "victories" were merely success in preventing further regress - in terms of corporate accountability, multilateral environmental agreements and women's health rights. Instead of governments committing themselves to conserve water and defend and uphold water rights of all their citizens, they were selling off water in privatization deals, even though water is not the property of the state, but the commons cared for and shared by communities. The privatization of water commons is illegal and illegitimate in common property law, natural law and moral law. This is why there were protests against water privatization through out W$$D. That is why we withdrew our consent from the process. The police attacked one such protest on 24th Aug with stun bombs, injuring three people. During a T.V. debate, when a person displaced by a dam in Lesotho to bring water to South Africa's industry and towns called money generated by water privatisation "blood money" -- the head of South Africa's water supply said, "I love blood money that creates wealth".

Johannesburg made it clear that the real clash of cultures is between cultures of life and cultures of death. The anti-poverty movement, the justice movement, the sustainability movement, the ecology movement are actually one movement, the movement to defend the resources for sustenance and right to sustenance as a natural right -- a right that is not given by states and cannot be taken away by greedy corporations. Corrupt deals on pieces of paper cannot extinguish that natural right. This is why in Johannesburg the movements had the moral power, not the corporations or governments.

The moral degradation of the ruling elites was also evident in the privatization of life through biotechnology and patents. Southern Africa has been made a victim of drought and famine under the joint impact of climate change and structural adjustment programmes. The World Bank has forced countries to destroy and dismantle their food security systems. Faced with severe drought, lack of food security is creating conditions of famine. More than 300,000 people face starvation. Famine caused by western powers is now being used to market GMOs through food aid. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have refused to accept GMOs in food aid. The WHO was mobilized to force African countries to accept GM food. The U.S. government made the force feeding of Africans with GMOs a major issue. When Colin Powell, representing President Bush kept insisting on African countries importing GM food from U.S. in the closing plenary of the Earth Summit, he was heckled by both NGOs and Governments. African farmers had come to Johannesburg with alternatives -- small scale, indigenous-based on farmers rights to land, water and seed.

The Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, organized 10 years after the Rio Summit which gave us the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Biosafety Protocol, was also reduced to a marketplace for pushing biotech on Africa. Hundreds of African farmers and government representatives condemned the U.S. pressure to force GM contaminated food aid. As civil society representatives from Africa stated, "We, African Civil Society groups, participants to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, composed of more than 45 African countries, join hands with the Zambian and Zimbabwean governments and their people in rejecting GE contaminated food for our starving brothers and sisters:

1. We refuse to be used as the dumping ground for contaminated food, rejected by the Northern countries; and we are enraged by the emotional blackmail of vulnerable people in need, being used in this way.
2. The starvation period is anticipated to begin early in 2003, so that there is enough time to source uncontaminated food.
3. There is enough food in the rest of Africa (already offered by Tanzania and Uganda) to provide food for the drought areas.
4. Our responses is to strengthen solidarity and self-reliance with in Africa, in the face of this next wave of colonization, through GE technologies, which aim to control our agricultural systems, through the manipulation of seed by corporations.
5. We will stand together in preventing our continent from being contaminated by genetically engineered crops, as a responsibility to our future generation."

There were in fact not one Summit but many. There was the hijacked Summit at Sandton, the richest suburb in Johannesburg. To get to the Convention Centre we had to pass a shopping mall. It was an appropriate symbol of a Summit that became a market for the earth resources. There was a limp official NGO gathering at NASREC. At a school, St. Stithians was the celebration of the People's Earth Summit, and in Soweto, children gathered for a Children's Earth Summit. The landless people and the small farmers had their own Summits. The alternative Summits were planning a people-centered, earth-centered agenda for the future. In the midst of corruption, they were creating courage and truth. In the midst of hopelessness they were creating hope. In the midst of violence they were creating on--violence.

When as civil society we walked away from the official process on September 4 and withdrew our consent, we did so in peace, in confidence and joy. We were brutally assaulted by the police of the apartheid era. We remembered Gandhi who was also assaulted on another September 11, and instead of responding to violence with violence, he shaped non-violence into the ultimate power of the weak and excluded. His "Satyagraha" - the "force of truth", was a different response from that to the events of the September 11, 2001. His satyagraha is our inspiration. As we said in our statement issued from the People's Earth Summit, "We are outraged that the World Summit on Sustainable Development, instead of being an Earth Summit, which reinforced the commitments made n 1992 in Rio de Janeiro to protect the Earth and strengthen the rights of the poor has been subverted by governments and corporations for their own ends at the expense of civil society and the Earth. We refuse to collaborate with laws and systems of governance that deny the most fundamental birthrights of people and our responsibilities within the Earth Community and future generations." Our collective civil society statement issued on September 4, when we disassociated ourselves with deep concern from the outcomes of the World
Summit on Sustainable Development was simultaneously and declaration of our resolve and commitment. "We celebrate our common resolve to strengthen the diversity of human cultures and the integrity of our Planet Earth. We reaffirm that `another world is possible" and we shall make it happen."