NANKIE: And this is eighty-nine, I’m Miss Nankie. My name is Miss Nankie Xhole. And I love you....

COMMENTATOR (COMM): Welcome to Alex FM - and the town that DJ Nankie loves: Alexandra, a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa.

NANKIE: You are enjoying yourself of course… So just stay tuned…

COMM: This month, Nankie’s listeners will be playing host to what’s billed as the biggest international conference this century: the World Summit on Sustainable Development, South Africa welcoming over sixty thousand people to debate nothing less than the planet’s future.

DR NKOSAZANA DLAMINI ZUMA, Minister of Foreign Affairs, South Africa: We want to host the Summit because we want to work towards the eradication of poverty in the world. We want to make sure our common destiny takes into account the wellbeing of everyone – the whole of humanity. And that’s what’s important for all of us, and for South Africa.

COMM: South Africa’s guests won’t have to look far for the kind of poverty the Summit’s meant to eradicate - just take a tour round the streets of Alex and talk to the people who live there.

ELIAS: We’re living in a, in a bad situation - the environment, it’s all bad. Fifty people living in one yard, it’s all a bad experience for all. And sharing the toilet and using the same drain, whatever, doing washing dishes and everything, it’s a bad experience for everybody like health-wise and all those things.

NGOFY: We don’t have even a tree for a shade, you don’t have green grass. So environment in Alexandra is a disaster. Even green grass, it’s a privilege to live in a house that there’s green grass. You know, since I was born I’ve never had green grass in my life.

COMM: Growing up in Alex: a bad environment, with the danger of social breakdown.

ANNA TIBAIJUKA Executive Director, UNCHS-(Habitat): Definitely, growing up in Johannesburg is not really an easy thing. First of all, you know, you need a lot of family and community support not to get drawn into, for example, anti-social behaviour. So you find the crime rate, for example, in Johannesburg is very high - not because the people of Johannesburg are bad people, but because of this environment in which they are growing up. Let us take education. Many people advocate education, but they forget that shelter is the basis for good education. If a kid has been sleeping in a room with eight other people, so even the night was uncomfortable, how do you expect a child to pay attention in school? Because health depends on where you live - the whole question of slum life therefore becomes almost a vicious circle.

STEVE BRADSHAW: What could the Summit do for people like those in Alexandra?

DR NKOSAZANA DLAMINI ZUMA: You know, I think this Summit is really going to boost – and unleash a lot of energies for those people who are already looking at what they can do to take really development into their hands. And I think that, for me, is a very positive thing, for there is a lot of energy in the world to really do something about poverty eradication. And if our leader - political leadership can give a very clear direction and very clear guide, the whole world will embrace that programme.

COMM: While the Summit’s being hosted by the South Africans, its political programme has been drawn up by the United Nations who dubbed it the ‘sustainable development’ summit.

STEVE: But just what is ‘sustainable development?’

JAMES WOLFENSOHN: Sustainable development is integrated development. It is where you build a societal approach which is owned locally, where there is a reason for it to happen, where trees are perceived as being of value to the community - not just something that you just cut down to get wood. Where cleanliness, where dealing with degradation of an environment is seen by the people as affecting their health, as affecting their possibilities.

ASHOK KHOSLA, President, Society for Development Alternatives, India: I believe sustainable development means a development in which there’s much greater equity than there is in today’s form of development, much greater emphasis on maintaining the environment in the resource base. And much greater emphasis on an economic development that basically meets the needs of the poorest.

MAURICE STRONG Secretary General 1992 Rio Earth Summit: Simply: if you want to look at it in business terms, it’s like running the earth as ‘earth incorporated’ with a depreciation, amortisation and maintenance account. Which simply means ensuring that you, you – through the production process we do not destroy the underlying assets which continued development depends on.

COMM: Sustainable development was meant to have been the outcome of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro ten years ago, held at the climax of international concern about the global environment. Leaders around the world signed up to a series of agreements to put the global economy on a more sustainable footing. But those who were involved now have mixed feelings about whether those promises were delivered.

Dr KLAUS TOEPFER, Executive Director, UN Environment Programme: The disappointments are unluckily more than the positive signals. There was on the one hand, of course, the huge increase in the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor: the social component. We have not decreased the problems of water. We have not decreased the extension rate of biodiversity. We have still the decrease of forest cover in the world. And especially we even couldn’t go in the positive direction concerning the economic co-operation.

MAURICE STRONG: You know we didn’t do it all, we didn’t save the world at Rio. But we did provide the basis on which, if governments and others live up to what they agreed to do in Rio, we will be on a pathway to a more sustainable future. The achievements were very clearly that, more than ever before, the world leaders - in fact more world leaders than up to that point had ever assembled around any particular issue - focused on the longer term future of life on our planet.

DR MOSTAFA TOLBA, Executive Director, UN Environment Programme 1974-92: Well, I must admit that either I was fooled or, or it was coming from the heart. The statements of a large number of the heads of state in the last couple of days were very impressive, indicating that we are on the verge of a different type of agreement - that there will be co-operation, there will be support, there will be understanding, better understanding. And I was so thrilled with the fact that Maurice Strong managed to get all these people together and they were committing themselves openly in this direction. And I - it never crossed my mind that this is a show, that we are on Broadway. COMM: The promises of politicians to kids like those in Alex: just showbiz. Maybe it doesn’t matter - most people in the world are better off than ten years ago. But old problems haven’t gone away, and disturbing new trends have emerged for a new century.

CAROL BELLAMY, Executive Director, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF): Poverty continues to exist in tremendous ways. Globalisation has taken place – and it’s good there’s economic improvements in some parts of the world - but it has created greater disparities in some parts of the world. The pandemic of HIV/AIDS has really torn apart some societies and made it more difficult for things to get done. Wars are on the increase in terms of their impact inside society - the victims today are largely civilian, not military anymore. So if you combine poverty, war, HIV/AIDS and a lack of government and private sector leadership, it comes together to say too little has been accomplished.

SONG LYRICS: ‘Nothing was delivered And I tell this truth to you Not out of spiteful anger But simply because it’s true.’

COMM: One reason too little has been delivered is that foreign aid from the rich countries to the poor has actually declined since Rio. Some say it’s because, with the end of the Cold War, the rich don’t need to bribe the poor not to go Communist. Others say it’s really a lot simpler than that.

J. K. GALBRAITH, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Harvard University: Well, no one should doubt it’s very disappointing. And no one should look for a deep, complex, sophisticated reason. There is a strong tendency in both private and public affairs for people who have income and have wealth to want more and to be negligent as far as the people who have less. As I say, that works as between individuals and unfortunately it works as between nation states.

COMM: Meantime the people with wealth have been getting richer much faster than the poor have been escaping poverty - inequality on the increase, both between and within nations. It’s happening in Jo’burg too: poor Alex losing out to rich Sandton, where this year’s Summit will be held - close to DJ Nankie’s station. NANKIE: The World Summit - is going to be held at Sandton Convention Centre and from here in Alex to go to Sandton is a fifteen minute drive, you know? It’s not far from here. Sandton is a shopping centre - it’s a Mall - whereby, you know, people from Alex usually go to Sandton to, to have a good time there. We buy at Sandton everything in Sandton. Sandton is a very nice place.

PHINDILE: Alex and Sandton, they’re two different worlds. It’s like there you like - you’re a queen. When you’re there you’re wearing nice clothes and everything you’re a Queen, you’re walking on nice grounds, you know? And you’re respected, regardless of whether you come from a shack place. Nobody knows you come from Alex, you know, you’re respected. But the minute somebody knows you come from Alex you get judged.

NGOFY: Ten minutes you are in Sandton, five minutes you are in Alexander. So even the materials, the space of the houses, their streets, their cars… So it’s a desire for everybody to live in Sandton. Everybody, when you wake up you want to live in Sandton.

COMM: It’s two worlds, though sometimes people do have their doubts which they’d really rather live in.

PHINDILE: I would live there but most of the time I’d be here. ‘Cos here I - we know each other here, you know? There’s like that thing of knowing each other and you feel at home when you’re here even though it’s dangerous but it’s - it’s an environment that you’re used to, you’re used to coming here at home and stuff like that, you know? So, there you don’t know a lot of people, people are just closed up in their houses and everything.

COMM: Extremes of wealth and poverty, the argument goes, lead not just to a fragmented society, but to huge pressures on the world’s resources. And societies that are so unequal may prove unsustainable politically too.

ASHOK KHOSLA: In the long run today, it’s obvious that the basic life support systems, - that um everyone depends on, the rich and the poor - are under great threat. And a large part of that threat is from affluence, from large-scale use for – of these resources by the rich. But also in part from the damages done by, by poor people. A way of life on this planet in which there are a few rich people and a large number of poor people is not sustainable, I believe, from an ecological point of view and certainly not from a political point of view.

PAUL KRUGMAN, Professor of Economics, Princeton University: I think it’s a misuse of the term ‘sustainable’ to talk about that. We’d like to think that inequality and injustice are ‘unsustainable’, unfortunately, you know, history says that’s not true, - it may be a bad thing but it’s not, it’s not something that you should confuse. It, it, you know, - inequality in the world is not unsustainable the way that fishing out the entire world’s stock of fish is unsustainable.

STEVE BRADSHAW: Does it matter if we’re more unequal if we’re also richer?

J. K. GALBRAITH, Author, ‘The Affluent Society’: Oh, I would always come out for a pressure for a more equal national and international society. Partly for reasons that have very little to do with economics. I think every civilised country should have a few screams of anguish from the very rich.

COMM: And that’s just what many in the rich world fear the Johannesburg Summit will be: an attempt to make the rich ‘scream with anguish’. If sustainable development does means redistributing wealth and regulating business, it’s not surprising that some - particularly in North America - view the environmental movement that preaches sustainable development as a threat. And this ideological tussle is getting increasingly acrimonious.

PAUL KRUGMAN, Professor of Economics, Princeton University: It’s one of the things that really depresses me about the past decade is we've seen the rise of a - actually anti-environmental movement. I mean there are people, I think people who have, who have the ear of the White House, who actually take some positive pleasure in disporting some environmental areas.

STEVE BRADSHAW: Why would they do that?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Er, because the environmental movement came to be a symbol of people pestering them about their business. I think it’s, it’s really, you know - it’s not all about economic self-interest, unfortunately there are symbols on both sides.

STEVE BRADSHAW: So that going to hinder progress at Johannesburg?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh enormously. The United States is, - you know you can't do much without the US ultimately and the United States is not really interested in this game.

COMM: It’s not just that the US can seem disinterested - some Washington lobbyists would actually like to see the Jo’burg summit fail. Especially if Rio was a precedent.

FRED L SMITH Jr, President, Competitive Enterprise Institute: I was at the Rio Conference in I992. It was a circus: everyone was running around caring about the environment and saying how we had to be concerned about Planet Earth but with not the slightest idea of what policies actually would allow Planet Earth to actually be saved. COMM: But these lobbyists from the American Right aren’t just green bashers. They have arguments which supporters of the Jo’burg Summit will have to answer. They say that all we really need to guarantee sustainable development is human ingenuity.

FRED SMITH: If you look at any resource that has been integrated into human relevant institutions: food, metals, energy, forestry and so forth, one finds that as man’s demands increase, one – and, and those demands sometimes trigger short-term supply imbalances - then we find prices go up and we do one of three things: we find more of that supply somewhere in the world; we find ways of using the existing supply more efficiently; we find ways of economising on that now scarce resource, or we find technological substitutes. And that process, repeated over and over again in field after field, is what’s made human civilisation unsustainable.

MAURICE STRONG, Secretary General,1992 Rio Earth Summit: Yes, but new technologies have come along and they do help the environment. But by the same token that’s what we’ve been doing: we’ve been letting things go, and, and overall - although there’s been progress - overall the environmental condition of the world, and therefore the prospects for our future, have deteriorated. That’s what’s happened.

COMM: In Alex, houseproud DJ Nankie dusts urban grime from the family home. According to the American Right, if you own it, you look after it. That’s why they say the best route to sustainability is private ownership.

FRED SMITH: One of the hopes one can see, if one really wishes a sustainable earth, would be to have a creative programme of privatisation to extend the concepts of ownership to those resources that have been left out in the cold. We see no depletion in areas that are owned. Because by ownership rights encourage you not only to use wisely today, but to ensure the value of that so you can sell it and utilise that value for the future.

STEVE BRADSHAW: So you think more privatisation, more private ownership?

FRED SMITH: Ecological privatisation is the critical answer to addressing environmental problems. Er and, well you - look about us, there is no endangered Persian cat problem. There is an endangered tiger problem.

STEVE BRADSHAW: What do you make of this argument that property rights are the answer to unsustainable development? ’ ASHOK KHOSLA, President, Society for Development Alternatives, India: Property rights are important in making it possible for the banking system and for the investments that are needed to be protected. But I certainly don’t have any evidence that personal and private property’s the only answer. I know of regimes in which common property and common ownership by the community of forests and waters and streams and grasslands worked very well. In fact, they worked better than privately owned ones. It’s a sense of ownership - sense of ownership - that is important for protecting resources. COMM: The arguments of the American Right may yet derail the Johannesburg Summit. But they’re still a minority view - even in the West. After the attacks on America on 11th September, many in the rich countries felt a renewed sense of community with the rest of the world and were reminded the rest of the world’s problems cannot be safely ignored. At the recent summit in Monterey, Mexico on financing development – a prelude to Jo’burg - sustainable development was back on the agenda.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN,President, World Bank: I think most people now recognise that problems in developing countries, and issues which confront them, are not just limited to those countries but globalisation basically means that we’re all living in each other’s world. And that being the case, I think there is a much greater readiness today to consider assisting other parts of the world. And that came through in Monterey, where there was evidence on the part of the European Union and on the United States, that they were prepared to increase development assistance.

DJ NANKIE: I think I must welcome my lovely guest...

COMM: At the grass roots, too, there are signs the Johannesburg Summit is once again catching the imagination. Tune into Nankie’s station, and you’re more than likely to hear a discussion with the latest NGO - or non-governmental organisation.

DJ NANKIE: …CARE being a new non-governmental organisation.

COMM: NGOs - not just in Alex, but across the world - are now preparing enthusiastically for the Jo’burg Summit.

NKOSAZANA DLAMINI-ZUMBA: What we’re expecting is many NGOs - particularly NGOs that deal with development issues, NGOS that deal with environment issues, ‘greens’ - So we’re really expecting to be a microcosm of the world.

MAURICE STRONG: At the grass roots level some very encouraging things have been happening. I meet all over the world with young people – thousands of young people who are on fire with it, who are just committed to-to the need to take a hand in shaping their own future – to some degree disappointed that we’re not doing it!

COMM: But NGOs like those which flourish in the streets around Alex FM are increasingly seen by the American Right as throwbacks to Sixties socialism. One more reason why they see the Jo’burg Summit as a threat.

FRED SMITH: Well, given the current nature of the NGO movement, which is probably the largest statist element in the world today, I think Johannesburg has the potential of being a, a great disaster. Because it embodies… essentially all of the bad ideas in the world today have sorted of melted away in most institutions but they are now totally embodied in the NGO Movement. My fear is that out of Johannesburg will come a whole series of-of moves to try to argue that rather than integrate the environment into the system that works - the marketplace – we will create a permanent barrier from environmental issues ever being integrated into the market. That will ensure that the environmental problems will persist, which will mean that the, the solutions or the governmental interference strategies that these people promote will have more and more validity each year. The problems will exist because they will have prevented them from being solved.

COMM: Still as the ideologues behind the Earth Summit play out their moves, Nankie and her friends in Alexandra have their own hopes for the Sustainable Development Summit.

DJ NANKIE: Their main aim in a way is to see the improvement of the lives of people in general around the world and around the countries in the communities. They want to see people living a better life where they are proud of themselves.

PHINDILE: I think it would help if we still had shacks if we had a very – if we had trees, most trees and a cooling environment for everybody.

ELIAS: And you get to live in your own yard, get your own kind of privacy – that’s the kind of life I would choose.

COMM: Small hopes - just the kind of realistic ambition you’d think the Johannesburg Summit could achieve. But as the organisers of the Earth Summit in Rio found out, even if promises can be agreed, you still can’t count on them being delivered.

DR MOSTAFA TOLBA: I am deeply concerned that there is too much talk and too little action. In that there are plenty, plenty of meetings and conferences at every level - ministerial, technicians, scientists, Heads of State. I am feeling disappointed in the fact that we never come up with a programme of action which is do-able in a certain period of time. Specific: five years, ten years - and I am saying do-able, costed, and identifying who is doing what in the implementation and who is going to pay what. Without that, it will continue to be the same jazz ever year, and every conference we meet.

COMM: DJ Nankie walks home through the kind of neighbourhood the Johannesburg Summit’s meant to help. For its opponents, the Summit is a misguided attempt to reheat ideas of state interference. For sceptics another round of banquets and insincere promises. But for some it could also be a last chance for a very simple and old-fashioned ideal.

J. K. GALBRAITH: And one must speak quite plainly: there is a moral objection, there is a moral damage that comes from placing one’s personal interest and a country’s personal stake ahead of one’s sense of humanity for those who are suffering from all of the things that are brought on by poverty. We should not doubt that the national escape from poverty and the individual escape from poverty are marred by a certain negligence, a certain selfishness. I wish people were not that way but they are.

STEVE BRADSHAW: What’s your message to the world leaders gathering in Johannesburg for this summit on sustainable development?

J. K. GALBRAITH: My message would be a very old and very commonplace one: that there is nothing so important as narrowing the gap between the rich world and the poor by - particularly by continued and well considered help to the economic and social development and stability of the poorer countries. There is no unseen formula that replaces a much stronger effort than we are already doing.

COMM: Next week ‘Life’ investigates child labour in the fireworks industry in Guatemala.