[Dryerase] The World Summit in Johannesburg, Nov. Public i

[SARAH BOYER]

The World Summit in Johannesburg: Notes from the Field

by Michael Goldman

On the drive from the Johannesburg airport to the wealthy white suburb of 
Sandton---host to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the 
largest international conference ever---colorful billboards cajole Summit 
delegates to taste and enjoy the city’s tap water, boasting that it is as 
pure and clean as bottled water. Suspended above the airport freeway, Black 
township boys splash joyfully in an endless bath of fresh blue tap water. 
Unlike bottled water, the messages imply that Jo’burg’s water is free, 
clean, and for all to enjoy.

Yet, after a few days of swimming through murky Summit politics, one learns 
that these omnipresent billboards were not purchased to assuage the fears of 
European delegates that African tap water is unsafe. Rather, the ANC-led, 
post-Apartheid South Africa has been busy packaging all of its public 
goods---water, electricity, sanitation, health services, transport 
systems---for sale to any willing buyer. From billboards to policy 
statements to business transactions, the message of the World Summit was 
loud and clear: Welcome to South Africa, where Everything is for Sale. Of 
the 60,000 Summit attendees, many were in town to buy (i.e., bargain-hunting 
large firms), sell (i.e., cash-strapped Southern governments), or mediate 
(i.e., entrepreneurial NGOs) these deals.

Only ten kilometers down the road, in classic Apartheid-like geography, the 
rigidly segregated and decrepit township of Alexandra (“Alexî) houses 
Sandton’s underemployed labor force. Without good public transportation, 
health clinics, schools, or basic public services, Alex stands as a grim 
reminder of all that has not changed since liberation. Three hundred 
thousand people in Alex are packed into just over two square miles of land 
without access to affordable clean water, electricity, safe housing, or 
basic sanitation services. The key word is “affordable,” as many of these 
services have been provided but have now been shut off because people cannot 
afford to pay for them. In a dramatic political U-turn, the new politics of 
the post-liberation African National Congress (ANC) is one that conforms to 
the Washington consensus’ view of the market as “willing buyer, willing 
seller,” which has been imposed on poor (Black) South Africans in the most 
draconian fashion.

Today, South Africa is still reeling from a deadly cholera outbreak that 
erupted from the worst wave of government-enforced water and electricity 
cut-offs. At the outset of the epidemic, which has infected more than 
140,000 people, the government cut off one thousand people’s (previously 
free) water supply in the rural Zululands for lack of a $7 reconnection fee. 
In addition, 43,000 children die yearly from diarrhea, a function of limited 
or no water and sanitation services. The Wits University Municipal Services 
Project (http://www.queensu.ca/msp) conducted a national study last year 
that identified more than ten million out of South Africa’s forty-four 
million residents who had experienced water and electricity cutoffs. 
Epidemiologists say that these cutoffs were the catalysts to the national 
cholera crisis.

Township activists have struck back by forming by day the Soweto Electricity 
Crisis Committee (SECC) of the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), the Western 
Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the Concerned Citizens’ Forum in Durban and 
working by night with stealth teams re-connecting homes before dawn 
(“Operation Khanyisa”, as it is called in Soweto, which the ANC has called 
the new “criminal culture” of the townships). When a stealth team 
disconnected the Jo’burg’s mayor’s home from electricity in April, they were 
met with live ammunition and arrest, spending eleven days in the notorious 
Apartheid Diepkloof prison without a bail hearing.

What’s all this have to do with the World Summit on Sustainable Development? 
The changes occurring in the workers’ townships were mirrored in the agenda 
of this international forum. As a follow-up to the momentous Rio Earth 
Summit in 1992, the Jo’burg Summit’s mission was to assess the 
accomplishments and failures of the past ten years, and to agree upon a 
program of what should be accomplished over the next decade. The agenda 
emphasized five basic issues (or goods): Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture, 
and Biodiversity. After a series of preparatory committee meetings were held 
on each continent, with government officials, staff from major 
intergovernmental agencies, international environmental organizations, and 
respondents to “open” invitations to all members of so-called civil society, 
the agenda and its main policy document read like both a World Bank policy 
paper and a wish list for the world’s largest service sector firms (e.g., 
Vivendi, Suez, Saur, Bechtel, RWE/Thames Water). These firms, meanwhile, 
have spent these last few years signing large contracts with Southern 
governments to manage the basic public goods that can often make the 
difference between life and death for the poor majority.

The most prevalent actors at the Summit were the World Bank and the IMF, and 
their “environmental agenda” has become unambigously neoliberal. Their water 
policy, for example, has become a new condition for future financing and 
debt relief. The threat is that the capital spigots will be shut off for 
those governments refusing to consider privatizing their water services. As 
overwhelming debt has toppled governments and created dire social conditions 
such as poverty and the present famine in southern Africa, and as populist 
movements demand that their governments stop servicing these odious and 
unjust debts, the Bank and IMF are using the lever of debt relief to force 
water policy reform on borrowing-country governments. Hence, privatization 
has become much more than a policy that economically benefits a few 
transnational firms; it also increases the political roles of international 
finance institutions and transnational firms in the global South. Thanks to 
the Bank’s arm-twisting, indebted governments are allowing Northern firms to 
become institutionally embedded in the everyday lifeworlds of the people of 
the South: Northern firms now provide the people’s water, power, health 
care, and garbage pick-up, and firms now even send them a consolidated bill 
to collect their money. It is to these firms that one must go if one needs 
basic goods for household survival.

Reading the Summit Script

The rise of this World Bank-style green neoliberal politics can be clearly 
read in the script of the 2002 Jo’burg World Summit. On one level, the 
storyline typical of these international forums remains the same: 
unenforceable targets, goals, heartless steamrolling by the U.S., and 
last-minute heroics by a few fearless Southerners. The defensive World Bank 
generates press releases that decry Europe and the U.S. for their huge 
subsidies for agribusiness; a Bank vice president even apologizes for the 
Bank’s role in the famine in southern Africa, by forcing highly indebted 
countries to eliminate subsidies to their farmers who could not afford the 
inputs to produce this season. Perhaps millions will starve as a 
consequence. The Bank’s presence can also be felt in the final agreements of 
the Summit. The official negotiations concluded like this: Under the 
category of water, government leaders agreed to halve by 2015 the number of 
people---now an estimated 2.4 billion---who live without basic water and 
sanitation (a guideline doggedly opposed by the U.S.). Under the category of 
energy, the U.S. and OPEC would not allow targets to pass for renewable 
energy, especially the Brazilian proposal endorsed by most countries to 
quadruple the world’s use of clean energy by 2010. The EU pushed a more 
modest plan for a 1 per cent increase over the next decade.

Under the category of agriculture and fishing, the World Bank’s Global 
Environmental Facility (GEF) was given the authority to fight against 
desertification and to rebuild fish stocks “where possible” by 2015, all in 
very vague language that critics argue may undermine existing and more 
concrete agreements. U.S. and European delegates refused to phase out their 
own agricultural subsidies, support organics, or restrict genetically 
modified crops. Under the category of biodiversity, the Summit took a big 
step backwards in watering down existing wording to “stop and reverse the 
current alarming biodiversity loss” to language that could satisfy the U.S. 
The big news was under the unexpected category of corporate accountability: 
Due to a well-constructed campaign by North-South pressure groups, 
governments accepted that binding rules could be developed to govern the 
behavior of multinational companies, language which the U.S vigorously 
fought, even after the agreement had been signed. No timetable, however, was 
set for such negotiations.

Finally, there remain the two most significant elements to the official 
World Summit. One was the “consensus” or the widespread acceptance by NGOs, 
foundations, governments, intergovernmental organizations, and of course 
corporations, of the mechanism of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) or the 
leasing of traditionally public services to private firms and the 
circumventing of international agreements and agencies that have often 
mediated between strong firms and weak states. In other words, as a 
complement to UN Secretary General Kofi Anan’s Global Compact with firms, no 
longer are the transnational corporations the silent partner and discrete 
beneficiary of the “world of development”; now, they become the legitimized 
main driver. The second, equally as pernicious, is the agreement to give the 
World Trade Organization (WTO), which seeks to eliminate all obstacles to 
“free trade,” the power to override international environment agreements. 
This marks the re-ascendancy of the WTO when some thought, post-Seattle, 
that the hubristic WTO was withering away.

Cracks in Summit coalitions, however, showed during some decidedly 
anti-Summit events in town. Jo’burg was jammed with large public forums on 
land reform; on privatization of water and electricity; on fisheries and the 
rapidly decreasing access to fish resources by fishing communities; on 
evictions and poor housing conditions; on World Bank boycott campaigns; and 
on environmental issues such as GMO foods and nuclear power. Across the 
board, southern African-based groups were busy organizing across national 
borders throughout southern Africa, but also more widely as they brought 
together movement leaders from Brazil, India, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mexico, and 
more.

On the day the heads of state arrived to sign the World Summit’s final 
agreement, 20,000-30,000 marchers took to the streets under the banners of 
“Africa is Not For Sale” and “Phansi W$$D, Phansi!” (the Zulu command for 
“away with!” plus the initials of the World Summit). It was the first show 
of independent-left opposition since the ANC took power, and it reflected 
not just a politics of anti-ANC but a politics of anti-neoliberalism from 
around the world. From Bolivia to Ghana to Hungary, people’s movements are 
responding. In Jo’burg last month, perhaps we saw a glimpse of what’s to 
come, with tens of thousands of people organizing to resist what is 
officially called “sustainable development,” but is unambiguously a 
greened-over neoliberalism that has captured indebted Southern governments 
with few options but to comply.

Michael Goldman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the U of I, came here 
four years ago from Berkeley, CA and is currently teaching Transnational and 
Environmental Sociology. He is involved with an international network of 
scholars and activists educating people on the role of the World Bank and 
IMF in the global economy and in people's lives. His books include 
Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons and the soon 
to be completed Imperial Nature: The New Politics and Science of the World 
Bank.

For use by dryerase-members. Please send an email to 
imc-print at urbana.indymedia.org when reprinted.


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