Last-minute negotiations to resolve key disagreements ahead of the landmark UN Earth Summit on sustainable development started behind closed doors in Johannesburg today.
The 10-day summit opens on Monday.
On the table are the most controversial clauses of a 71-page plan to reconcile development and protection of the environment based on the hefty tome of recommendations known as Agenda 21 (for the 21st century) that came out of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992.
The delegates will also discuss good governance, which donor countries are linking to aid, and which is a central plank of the New Plan for Africa's Development put forward by African leaders and endorsed by the G-8 highly industrialised nations and by the African Union.
As the talks began, at least nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after landing at a jetty at South Africa's only nuclear reactor and climbing onto its roof to unfurl protest banners.
In the intense pre-summit negotiations, neither the United Nations nor the South African government would name the countries taking part. But diplomats said some 30 to 35 countries were expected to represent the various opinion blocks - notably the European Union and the G-77 group of developing nations.
Their biggest bone of contention is new objectives for poverty relief which the EU says are indispensable but which the US refuses to endorse.
The aim of the plan is to reduce by half by 2015 the number of people who lack access to clean drinking water, to slow the rate of loss of natural resources and a call to boost the global share of renewable energy sources to at least 15 percent by 2010.
The second set of proposals which risks throwing the summit into disarray pits the North against the South. The poor countries of the South want the wealthy ones of the North to pledge more Official Development Aid (ODA) and to dismantle their trade-distorting domestic farming subsidies.
They say these grants lead Northern farmers to produce surpluses which flood the markets of developing countries, making it hard for the local farmers to sell their higher-priced, unsubsidised produce at home or abroad.
AFP