The response of the South to the ongoing debate centered on the twin issues of justice and ecology has to be seen in the context of its historical experience of colonialism as it has led to the post-Bretton Woods industrialization and trade expansion era and into the emerging struggle for sustainable development in the post-UNCED, post-growth, post-modern era.

Dichotomies in Rio

In Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, there were innumerable opportunities for representatives of state and civil society alike to confront major competing, if not conflicting, issues that underlie the definition and operationalization of sustainable development. The issues have an individual dynamic of their own and represent currents in a general movement towards a new paradigm of development. As they flow into one another, some dichotomous relations emerge:

The debates on these complex realities have thrown into relief the disappointment of developing countries measured against the original conference objectives stated in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 44/228, where the areas most stressed -- financial and institutional arrangements and technology transfer -- are precisely the weakest in "The Earth Summit's" Agenda 21.

The concerns encompassed above acquire a fatal urgency when viewed against the backdrop of growing poverty, the gap between the rich and the poor segments of humanity, the approaching possibility of collapse of ecological life-support systems, and the realization by analysts like Herman Daly and other ecological economists that our biospheric system cannot carry more aggregate economic growth and its waste products.

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Areas of response:  Economics of sustainability

Many developing countries question the appropriateness of the logic that "economic growth will generate the resources that allow environment to be protected, reduce poverty, provide resources for growing population and even decrease population growth" and that market forces are "essential to growth." There is no evidence that market forces by themselves protect the environment or ensure social equity, which is necessary to reduce poverty.

A unanimous cry at Rio was precisely to change the economic models which had been a failure in previous development decades of the U.N. and had resulted in the poverty of great numbers of people and destruction of the planet's life-systems. There are however encouraging alternatives out of the mainstream that look at communities as units of enterprise and ecological surpluses as bases for trade transactions.

Areas of response: Poverty, Population and Consumption

In any analysis of the operationalization of sustainable development, there are among others, three interrelated factors to be found at the core -- population, poverty and consumption. But the fact is that population programs thus far have focused on reducing the fertility rates in developing countries and eschewed the admonition from the standpoint of consumption pattern per capita, the true measure of what Herman Daly calls "scale". If this is done, the Philippines index would be 2.4 (birthrate) x 1 or 2.4 units of consumption of food per capita as against the U.S. 1.5 x 6 or 9 units. This stresses the fact that the greater task is to focus on reducing consumption in the North.

It remains to iterate that the cycle of poverty in poor countries begins with the inequitable allocation of access to natural resources such as evidenced in the Philippines by the logging industry profits in the last 30 years. The profits exceed the country's foreign debt, benefitted only 480 families, and impoverished 18 million people in the uplands, where they contribute to further destruction of forest resources, while the transnational process of accessing such resources is uncontrolled.

Another area of response by the South is in the effort to transform the multilateral banks and the International Monetary Fund. Advocacy by Southern governments and NGOs has prompted the World Bank to include poverty reduction and lately environmental protection in its mission statement. However, the World Bank continues to function according to the post-Bretton Woods institutional archetype of economic expansion.

So dismal has been the World Bank's record of environmental protection and so legendary its non-transparent, non-democratic and non-participatory process that at this stage in the evaluation of the initial three-year pilot-phase operation of its Global Environment Facility, there is a persistent lobby by NGOs to set up GEF governance and secretariat functions independent of the World Bank.

The IMF, judging from a recent first consultation with NGOs on structural adjustment, still considers fiscal balance, and therefore it mandates adjustment conditions to guarantee currency parity as its most sustainable dogma, above social needs and the need to finance the shift to sustainability.

Major areas of environmental restoration that are most directly linked to development have immense implications particularly among African countries concerned with desertification. The issue of funding only "incremental costs" has ignored this and reinforced the general apprehension in the South that their national development needs are ritually sacrificed for the North's agenda.

Equally big has been the disappointment of the South over the failure of UNCED to translate development and poverty concerns into significant increases in aid flow. Only $2.5 billion in additional aid was pledged, compared to the estimated cost of Agenda 21 of $125 billion in additional annual flows. The United States exemplifies the failure to commit to the United Nations' target of 0.7 of donor country GNP, and the reluctance as well by the North to focus on actual reduction of debt payments made by the South.

The civil society in the South has pressed for a review of the quality aid and its allocation to basic human needs, but neither is happening, as per the UNDP's Human Development Report.

The same situation obtains with respect to the move to free aid from conditionalities and to look at it as payment for "ecological debt" incurred by the developed countries in the exploitation of the natural resources of developing countries. A case in point is the recent study by the World Resources Institute of the loss of natural capital in the forestry, agriculture and fisheries sector of the Philippines mostly due to the logging trade with Japan in the past 20 years amounted to 4% of GNP a rate larger than the increase of foreign debt for that period.

Areas of response: Local and Global Citizenship

The concern of the South to address local community poverty and ecosystem issues are not in contradiction; they form the necessary building blocks for the sustainability of the larger global whole. While new information affirms the interrelatedness of life-systems on the planet, it has served to evolve authority from ideological positions on the left and on the right to the realities of our ecosystem. It has also surfaced the imperative of devolving powers from the bureaucracies of the state, church and party to persons in communities exercising their democratic rights to participate in their own development. It demands ecological justice, access to information, and democratic participation at all levels of decision making as foundations of local and global citizenship.