Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Waiting for the Chair's Summary

One of the most exciting moments in the CSD review year is the waiting time for the Chair’s Summary to come out, traditionally in the afternoon of the second Tuesday of the session. As delegates go back from lunch, whispers bounce from the Vienna Cafe, on to the “neck” and the doors of Conference Room 4, asking if the Chair’s draft Summary has arrived.

By: Neth Dano, Third World Network

Well, who would not be excited to read the Chair’s summation of seven full-days of grand rhetoric, motherhood and fatherhood statements, interspersed with concrete national experiences on constraints and obstacles, plus lessons learned and best practices? The fact that CSD-16 covers a whole range of complex and highly intertwined issues in Agriculture, Rural Development, Land, Drought and Desertification, and of course, Africa, makes the job of summing up the discussions into one coherent document that will make everybody happy, a gargantuan task. Add to that the summary of the two-day discussions on SIDS and the review of the Water and Sanitation commitments from CSD-13 this week!

The Chair’s Summary is the principal document that bridges the Review year and the Policy year. The Delegates at CSD-17 next year will rely on it to deliberate and negotiate on the policy options and prescriptions at the global, regional and national levels relevant to the Agriculture thematic cluster towards the attainment of objectives of sustainable development. How well the Chair’s Summary captures the essence and strong messages from the (debatably) interactive discussions will shape the nature of deliberations and negotiation by the Delegates next year on policy options. The document has to effectively capture and frame the current situation - challenges, obstacles, constraints and lessons learned - in order for CSD-17 to give the appropriate responses and actions.

Based on the interventions over the past seven days, it is not hard to conclude that every government at CSD -16 knows well the problems in Agriculture and the intertwined issues in the current thematic cluster. Many developing countries have echoed trade imbalances and barriers; lack of financial resources, infrastructures, technologies, and capacities; access to productive resources; and lack of participation of stakeholders; as among the key obstacles and constraints. The G-77 and China repeatedly pointed out the need to recognize the interconnectedness among the issues under the cluster and the root causes behind the constraints and obstacles.

Land has been identified as a core issue in the current thematic cluster, with most delegates declaring that access to land and recognizing the tenurial arrangements for rural communities as crucial to attaining rural development. A number of concrete experiences in ensuring tenurial arrangements, some combining legal instruments with customary practices, have been shared, but very few countries talked about rights to land by the tillers and agrarian reform.

Climate change and environmental degradation figured prominently across the different sessions, as major obstacles to attaining sustainable development and posing major challenges to poor countries. Equally prominent in the discussions was the current food price crisis facing the world, which has been closely linked by many Delegates to the continuously rising price of oil, competition posed by agrofuels, and the impacts of climate change on production. Poverty and hunger, as consequences of the confluence of these factors, have been flagged up as key challenges.

Overall, the interventions of Delegates over the past seven days have not disappointed us. We heard all the obstacles and constraints and lessons learned repeated again and again, although few delved on the systemic roots. How they will be framed and from whose lens is the biggest challenge seen? It would be interesting to see how the key obstacles and constraints identified by Delegates in every session across themes will be presented in the Chair’s Summary without sounding like a broken record while at the same time ensuring coherence and maintaining the close interlinkages among the six themes under the cluster.

With such a resounding consensus on the recognition of challenges and lessons learned on the Agriculture cluster, the Chair's summary will surely be worth the wait.