Word: rios
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...tensions between North and South, and the financial conflicts that underlie them, run through every issue before the Rio negotiators -- even to the question of whether those are the proper issues to be discussing. Among the major disagreements...
...Bush Administration had hoped to make deforestation a showcase issue going into Rio. The presummit discussions opened with a U.S.-inspired proposal for an outright ban on logging in tropical forests. But the developing countries retaliated by demanding that the language cover temperate and boreal (northern) forests as well. The move was clearly aimed at the U.S., which has strenuously resisted any scrutiny of the logging practices in publicly owned ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest...
...lines have been so sharply drawn on all the forest-protection of issues that what was originally intended to be a legally binding forestry convention was watered down months ago to a nonbinding "statement of principles" that will probably be adopted at Rio. Whether a full-fledged treaty will be negotiated later is still uncertain...
Both documents will be adopted at Rio, but neither bears much resemblance to the original conception. After weeks of debate, the Earth Charter was abandoned and replaced by a woodenly written declaration filled with the kind of pious promises ("eradicating poverty," "eliminat((ing)) unsustainable patterns of production and consumption") that world leaders often make but never keep. In what is perhaps the worst example of bureaucratic obfuscation, ^ the text at one point endorses the promotion of "appropriate demographic policies" -- the nearest negotiators could come to confronting the explosive issue of population control...
...negotiators despaired of settling the funding questions in advance and agreed to reopen the issue in Rio. Some observers think the Group of 77 may have made a tactical blunder by pushing so hard for financial and technical aid. Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the U.N., has called it a "diplomatic mistake of the highest magnitude." Others criticize the Earth Summit organizers, who by putting so many environmental problems on the negotiating table may have inadvertently ensured that none of them get solved...