Africa Regional Preparatory Meeting for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development 

Opening Remarks

by K. Y. Amoako,
Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa
17 October 2001, Nairobi, Kenya

Honourable Ministers Excellencies,
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

I feel greatly honoured to be delivering this statement at the African regional preparatory meeting for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. On behalf of the Expanded Joint Secretariat and on my own behalf, I would like to express our appreciation to all African countries for their support to the African preparatory process.

My colleagues and I fully appreciate the great efforts and collaboration shown by members of the Expanded Joint Secretariat, without which nothing could have been achieved in the preparatory process. In this regard, my thanks go to all the members of the Secretariat, which is composed of UNEP, OAU, ADB, UNDP/Capacity 21, ECOWAS, AMU, SADC, IGAD/COMESA, ECCAS and the ECA.

Honourable Ministers Dear Participants

There are two ways I could address you. Firstly, I should salute all the hard efforts, which have been made over the past ten years since Rio, to create national development strategies which foster sustainable development and also laud the number of excellent actions and the many courageous people who have done as much as they could to help reverse environmental damage on the continent and improve our future prospects. Then, I should encourage us onward by outlining a group of general areas in which we should ask the Johannesburg conference to help us all do better. This I will do, but only in part.

For I owe you more candor and a greater exposure to my inner most thoughts. And they are these: the global community, including us here in Africa, has failed to hear the warnings from Rio. We have had an adequacy of words, but an inadequacy of actions. And as a result we have even fewer years left to prevent the world, including our countries and our precious people, from sliding into a nasty spiral of environmental decline and great human misery.

From time immemorial, humanity has managed to pass down an environment from one generation to the next that has had promise for the future. We have the distinction of being part of the few generations to break that promise. Our inheritors will receive a markedly worse environment and much worse prospects, if present trends continue.

We all know the trends. The trends will have us increase a full degree in temperature over the next half century and that will bring us: 10 percent less rain in Southern Africa and the Horn; and 15% less rain in the already parched Sahel. If present trends continue, our forests will shrink by 25% over the next half century. Our brothers and sisters in low-lying coastal areas will have to move inland because of a rising ocean. Land degradation and pollution trends in Africa are equally grim, facing a double threat from global climate changes and high population growth.

You can describe all these trends better than I. Unfortunately they come side by side with other sobering portents: the declining global solidarity to do something about these trends; the weak implementation everywhere of global agreements on sustainability; the decline of development assistance which has struck this continent particularly harshly in the last decade; the erosion of support of the Kyoto Protocols; and, frankly, the prospect that this Johannesburg Summit will not be a first class event of real commitments and real actions to reverse these trends.

So the very first thing I ask of you is to not sugar coat the drama of our global and African environmental and development situations. Arguably, we on this continent are custodians of one of the most fragile environments in the world. We are the canary in the coal mine. If we do not sing loudly, we will be the first to die.

Political leaders everywhere are said to have a worry span of two years or less. That is, normally they will not make a priority out of a problem unless they can start to visibly solve the problem in less than two years. We must learn to make the arguments that raise the visibility and priority of environmental issues on our leaders' political agenda. It is something I have to do more and I suggest we all have to do more. We have to make environment an issue our leaders speak of in our national parliaments, in the UN General Assembly, in the World Bank annual meetings, at Davos and in our main forums throughout Africa. I can tell you that the main enemy of the sustainability of our environment is our own silence. The issues will fail and the Johannesburg summit will be a failure unless we talk up the issues at home and around the world, regularly, persistently, at all levels and with reasoned urgency.

And for this we need good information. We need to know where we stand here in Africa on sustainability. We need consistent data and we need reliable data. We at ECA hope to make a small contribution in this direction. Our 2001 Economic Report on Africa, due out next year will launch new indicators on sustainable development.

We will begin to regularly report on a new Environmental Sustainability Index drawing upon three components: environmental quality (consisting of water quantity and quality, bio-diversity and air quality); environmental stress (consisting of pollution, consumption and waste, deforestation and population variables); and environmental protection actions. We will also cast our economic reporting into terms of economic sustainability. We hope that this will give you and your colleagues at home a good deal of information to help you highlight national and regional environmental concerns.

So far, I have indicated that our voice on these issues must be dramatic, much more urgent and informed by solid data. Now let me indicate some areas where we can speak in solidarity to make a difference at Johannesburg. I think there are six subject areas that I hope will command our special attention. This is a lot to cover and I will do so rapidly.

First, we have to get our population growth under far better control. Under current trends in the year 2050 Tanzania will have 89 million people, South Africa 91 million, The Congo 165 million, Ethiopia 213 million and Nigeria 339 million. It is hard to imagine what the quality of life would be with our countries expanded to such magnitudes, but it is certain that the environments in our countries would be tested well past the limits of endurance. If we cannot markedly slow down our population growth, frankly, we cannot expect the world to partner with us on the rest of our sustainability issues. Population commitments must be in our national and regional commitments to convincingly set the stage for Johannesburg.

Second and foremost in the subject areas on the Johannesburg agenda, in my view, must be climate change, since that will increasingly drive all the other environmental and development issues. The main players in the Kyoto discussions are the industrialized countries and it is obvious that we have suffered an enormous setback with the US withdrawal from the Protocols. But, frankly, actions were lagging from a number of the signatories, too.

It would be good to see a serious political approach by the collected heads of state of Africa to make the case that Africa's long term security is as much affected by the Kyoto Protocols as it is by military security; maybe more. So, if richer countries share an interest in having us be secure, they must back the Kyoto Protocols. Indeed, we must push at Johannesburg to go beyond Kyoto to establish sector-level emission reductions and stronger enforcement.

The next subject area is water. Statistics indicate that the continent utilizes only about 4% of the abundant freshwater resources of its rivers and lakes. The rest goes to waste. Yet, our fast growing population continues to place such a high demand on our available water resources that Africa is one of only two regions in the world facing water shortages. This is a result of our failure to develop our water resources. It is my understanding that in 25 years, about 20 countries on the continent will experience water scarcity. At present, the figure stands at 14.

At the 2nd World Water Forum in The Hague in March last year, I stated that there was need for a new way of thinking about water resource management. Our water resources need to be managed to secure an adequate and reliable supply of water to support our socioeconomic development. At the same time, they should also be managed to protect the gains of development from the potential damaging impacts of too much or too little water resulting from floods and droughts.

To meet these challenges, the ECA, together with the AfDB, members of the Expanded Joint Secretariat, and other stakeholders such as the Global Water Partnership, developed the African Water Vision 2025, which calls on us all to accord an appropriate priority to water in our socioeconomic planning and in the allocation of resources for development.

Carrying on "business as usual" is not an option and since the World Water Forum much effort has been expended by the UN system and various African stakeholders on how best to implement the clear vision set out in The Hague. I call on all governments represented here to adopt African Water Vision 2025 and work with us to translate it into concrete action.

The fourth issue on the Johannesburg agenda is desertification, and again, we are the top continent of concern. It has taken nearly most of the decade since Rio to establish the Convention to Combat Desertification and its Global Mechanism of expert staff. The result is a major commitment by the International Fund for Agricultural Development to allocate a good deal of its portfolio to projects to limit the growth of deserts. But even these welcome resources do not come close to matching the severity of the problems. The Global Mechanism has only five full time professionals and IFAD is relatively small. Johannesburg will fail on the desertification issue if it cannot be a great deal more dramatic in its response. I believe we are the best continent to spell out what that response should be and so I encourage you in this direction.

Fifth is soil degradation and again, I am afraid, we are one of the continents with the most at stake. As you know, soil degradation was not a prime issue for action at Rio. With the perspective of another decade of erosion and much greater understanding of the consequences for us, we all know that we must make up for lost time at Johannesburg. A hallmark of the upcoming Summit must be agreement on making reversal of soil degradation a global priority on par with the main priorities from Rio. The details of such an initiative have been formulated by the Global Environment Facility and I believe they warrant Africa's full endorsement.

The last substantive issue I want to discuss with you is access to the technologies that will best preserve Africa's wealth of soil and water while allowing us to feed our expanding populations. We at ECA believe that even though Africa has not really begun to widely benefit from the Green Revolution, we may have to leapfrog that revolution for ecological and economic reasons to embrace the next agricultural revolution, the Gene Revolution. Advanced gene technologies are already raising incomes in parts of our continent. From the decade old Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute in Egypt which is now producing bio-pesticides, to the banana tissue culture bio-technology now making such a difference in South Africa and this country, bio-technology is showing us that we have huge stakes in this field. Other very important applications are being developed elsewhere to permit farmers to easily diagnose plant and animal diseases, and new ways are being found to do bio-technological research more quickly. The potentials for sustainable growth in Africa of these and other bio-technological developments, available now and expected in the next decades, is immense.

Certainly there is debate about the long-term effects of genetic engineering. We, in African policy circles, ought to be in the vanguard of those pointing out that the Green Revolution was also based upon genetic engineering and that it was a resounding success. Our problem is not so much one of safety, although we obviously need to be careful. No, our real problem is access, as the promise for us is so huge. In ECA's Economic Report for 2001, which, as I say, will be available next year, we call for a massive scaling up of poverty-focused public sector genetic research; strong and open debate on safeguards so we gain public support of the research results; and solid collaboration with researchers on this continent based on real-world, small farmer needs. Lastly, we call for issues pertaining to intellectual property rights to be squarely addressed. This, as you well appreciate, is fundamental. Bio-technology for Africa's agriculture must be shared with us at affordable prices. This is as vital an issue to our future as is access to medicines to treat HIV/AIDS. We must first educate our leaders and our publics on the stakes involved. Then we must be strong at Johannesburg.

Friends:

You have a great deal of work to do and I don't want to keep you from it. Let me just thank you for your dedication to these issues. If we can move towards a sustainable Africa, I cannot think of a greater potential gift, which we together can give to our children and our children's children.

Godspeed and thank you.