Back from the Summit

For the ten days of the World Summit in August and early September, dawn was like any other dawn in the swish suburb of Sandton in northern Johannesburg. Tidy streets, office blocks, a mall, a modest convention centre, omnipresent security, and the area's hillocks covered by a thin sheen of acrid smoke from the stoves of the nightwatchmen guarding its mansions, and the smouldering black township of Alexandria below. In this land of hope and guilt, scattered with paradoxes, little is simple. Solutions are at hand, but are complex and slow in the making.

Why, then, should things have been any different, any simpler, at the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) camping out in Sandton? To judge from the international media, anxious for a quick closure before their bulletins filled up with 9/11 memorabilia, the event teetered between a qualified success and a big disappointment. Most media outlets, using the same footage and the same quotes from the same few lobbyists (from Oxford, Islington, Washington and Paris), dismissed as tepid any progress on the Summit's various conventions, and mithered on about the absence of day-passes for NGO observers, of funding pledges and of President Bush, in that order.

Agriculture, as a topic, had done well to clamber back onto the main agenda, after a spell of being overlooked. It was only in May that it became part of the 'WEHAB Five' of water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity which UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan more or less imposed on the WSSD.

The current wisdom is that the major barrier to the blossoming of agriculture in developing countries is rooted in the lack of access to Western markets, and the moronic farm subsidies of the US and EU. If that is indeed the case, then developing country agriculture did not fare spectacularly well in Sandton. All that happened, it may seem, was for all parties to tread water, and reconfirm that these issues are to be sorted out in the World Trade Organisation under the Doha agreements. But if the same agriculture requires more than the yank of trade to flourish, if it also needs investment, respect, pride and capacity building (again in that order), then it can take good heart from the WSSD. The final, inter-governmental, agreements give it more space, funding opportunities and - perhaps most important of all - visibility.

Much less well-reported, but conversely more significant, is the myriad of agreements between civil society organisations, business and governments in all WEHAB areas. These Type Two outcomes, which the UN says supplement the Type One governmental pledges, include breakthroughs in agriculture. Take the partnerships set up between the plant science industry federation known as CropLife International and community and extension NGOs in Africa and Asia, to develop a Web-based training programme. Or between the agricultural research centres, environment groups and field NGOs on eco-agriculture. Or the World Summit task force of agricultural media professionals which will strengthen the sector's communication skills. Or the new Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) initiative, led by civil society, supported by governments and facilitated by FAO. All of these, and an estimated 200 others, provide the backbone for revitalising agriculture in developing countries.

Such Type Two outcomes are criticised by some lobbying NGOs as absolving governments of their responsibilities. Not so, says Kofi Annan, who sees them as a way to widen participation, and, in his more esoteric moments, as a way to enlarge governance beyond governments. Time is on his side, and not of NGO leaders weaned on state regulation and provision. Their window of opportunity is closing now. When small farmers' leaders can co-chair a WSSD event with the Director-General of FAO and when that same DG can insist, publicly, that sustainable agriculture has to be 'holistic' and embrace fair labour rights, then there is clearly something afoot that is beyond the command of the classical NGOs.

There is nothing new here. In the sense that events like World Summits are best seen as opportunities for building partnerships and innovation on concrete activities, this one will be seen, in retrospect, as a magnificent success.

An hour's drive away from Sandton, tucked away in the Shaft 17 area, was a gathering of several hundred members of farmers' organisations, brought together by the southern Africa PELUM group. Like others, they divided their days between their own base, the civil society forum, the trade fair-like Ubuntu Village and the UN session itself. Their long journeys symbolise a major lesson from WSSD: to be better neighbours, it is better to be near each other.

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