The climate change foxtrot

By Terry Lacey

(September 29, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) The sequence of meetings leading up to Copenhagen seems like a series of sedate preliminary dancing competitions leading up to the finals. The analogies are clear. The quickstep is illusory because it goes slow-slow-quick-quick-slow. The slow foxtrot is definitely just slow. And it takes two to tango.

Will Copenhagen be more like a line dance in Laos, where we all end up each dancing on our own, but nobody really gets into a clinch?

It is said by informed ornithologists that the reason that the Ouzzalam bird became extinct was that its mating dance was so complicated that it forgot why it was doing it.

UN climate Chief Yvo de Boer said in Bangkok “Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out”. There are only 70 days to go to Copenhagen and Michael Casy in Bangkok (AP) said that negotiations were bogged down “by a broad unwillingness to commit to firm emissions targets, and a refusal by the developing countries to sign a deal until the West guarantees tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance”. (Jakarta Post 29.09.09).

If we take a step back for as moment from the impending doom of civilization as we know it, international development concepts and conferences seem to have been based on a series of fads and fancies since international aid got going after the second world war. Will climate change prove to be just one more fashionable slogan to be applied to key development priorities, or will it get real?

The first United Nations Fund for Economic Development got off to a shaky start after the officials who started it realized (too late) that it spelt UNFED, so they had to rename it the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED).

Later the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) tried to start redressing the balance between the Group B (who were really the Group A – the rich developed countries) and “the rest” who were the Group of 77, since much expanded.

The wits rapidly worked out that UNCTAD really meant “Under No Circumstances Take Any Decisions”.

When the UK joined the European Community (EC) the six original members, who had already taken on trade and development obligations to the old French empire, mostly in Africa (via the Treaty of Yaounde´), were persuaded to also take on like obligations to the ACP (the African, Caribbean and Pacific group) via the Lome´ Convention, which at least sounded more like a rock band.

Asia and Latin America were considered too big, too poor and too politically non-U to get similar privileged status and became defined as “Non-Associates”.

The British tried to pull India and Asia in, but the toothless old bulldog had less bark and even less bite by 1973 so the final harmonization of a global system of relations between the European Union (EU) and the developing world did not really start until the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI) regulations started in 1996.

The point is of course that there have always been clubs of U and non-U, the in-group and the out-group. And there was never real equality between essentially unequal partners in any of these deals.

The latest decision to move the focus from the G8 to the G20 is a good sign and the G20 represents 85 percent of the world Gross Domestic Product, whereas the G8 represented 50 percent (essentially the big Western powers including Japan).

Amazingly all the rest of the UN membership outside the G20 only accounts for 15 percent of world GDP.

But even with some of these U and non-U historical differences at last out of the window, the fact remains that the non-G20 club motto should perhaps be the famous quote from Groucho Marx, rather than Karl Marx, “that I would never join any club that would have me as a member”.

But now we are all in the same boat. And it could sink. So we all need to dance to a different tune.

(Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.)

-Sri Lanka Guardian