By David Trimble MP MLA 
UUP PRESS

 The Earth Summit — the World Summit on Sustainable Development — has received a great deal of carping criticism, some of it justified. If it actually achieves anything and whether the agreed recommendations are implemented remains to be seen.

It seems to me, though, that if the international spotlight falls, however briefly, on the really big questions for the human race — water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity — that is welcome.

Of course, there are those who "we have enough problems of our own to worry about" and that is certainly true but the 21st century reality is that what goes on half-way around the world does affect us back in Northern Ireland.

>From our privileged position within the UK it is easy to lose sight of the grinding poverty in the developing world, most glaring as it is in Africa itself. 2.5 billion people in the world - that is nearly 2,000 times the two billion have no electricity.

Another billion people have no access to safe drinking water. Every year, 11 million children under five die from common, easily preventable diseases. If the Johannesburg summit is about anything it is about finding a way for the 1.2 billion people in the world who exist on less than $1 a day to become richer, healthier and better nourished without killing the earth with pollution. Unless the world collectively can deal with that issue the effects of unsustainable development will be felt by all of us.

Doubtless, as on many such spectacular international summitry occasions dominated by delegates from the developing world, the West will be called to account for the sins of the world. Of course, the West is not perfect. Most developed countries have failed to meet their commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions to 1990 standards by 2000.

But when affected by natural disasters, as central Europe has been recently, dozens die. Similar catastrophes in the developing world leave thousands dead. Nor is it an accident that the world's greatest environmental disaster - Chernobyl - occurred under totalitarianism or that the world's poorest people are those living under corrupt dictatorships and in areas ravaged by war.

Take Africa. The uncomfortable truth is that most Africans are relatively poorer now than they were under colonialism. In the ghastly mess that is Zimbabwe a tyrannical president in just 20 years has turned Africa's larder into a model for how not to do things. Zimbabweans starve as a result of crazed land policies and Mugabe's adventurism in central African wars.

This massive wastage of natural resources has been allowed to occur because basic human and democratic rights are denied. The contrast with neighboring Botswana — a fully-functioning peaceful democracy since independence, consequently prosperous and the only black African nation able to afford the retroviral drugs needed to combat the HIV pandemic - is stark.

Some say that financial aid can cure these ills. Of course, aid has its part to play but unless it is linked to democratization, it is next to useless. Sustainable development is essentially a political problem with a political solution.

Democracies do not make expensive wars with each other. They resolve their differences through diplomacy. Likewise, in democracies, corrupt politicians who take bribes in return for licenses to polluters can be thrown out.

But where the rule of law does not run, development is not possible. Most of the world's poorest people cannot participate in the formal economy because they lack basic property rights. How can you benefit from electricity if you have no legal address? How can you invest if you have no property to use as collateral?

The greatest gift the West can give the developing world is democracy and the rule of law, not checks to be used by dictators to squander. It should do so not only for altruistic reasons but out of self-interest: the worst
polluters of this century unless the current situation is checked will be in the Third World. Those feeling the worst effects of pollution most, though, will continue to be the poor.

The West, however, is not providing the incentives for the developing world, especially Africa, to reform itself. The international reaction to the situation in Zimbabwe, as in Rwanda and Zaire before this, essentially consists of hand-wringing.

Meanwhile, the EU — the biggest economic bloc in the world today — has erected massive barriers around itself which make it impossible for the developing world to benefit from free trade. The problem is not globalization but the fact that globalization is a misnomer: much of the globe is not participating.

Northern Ireland is participating as part of the world's fourth-largest economy. The administration at Stormont is grappling with the legacy of neglect under Direct Rule. But we are not immune to the effects of pollution elsewhere in the world.

We are beginning to make a success of a fully-functioning democracy. We have a duty to let that light shine through those huge tracts of the world where democracy has never existed or has been snuffed out. That is why I am in Johannesburg.