JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Today's announcement by the European Union and the United States at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) of a "breakthrough" on trade and investment issues, leaves the door open to a corporate raid on resources and developing countries' agriculture. It also marks the end of the Rio sustainability agenda.

The "precautionary principle" was considered one of the two main pillars of the Rio agreement. However, the United States have already announced they will not support it and sources in South Africa indicate Canada will follow in the American footsteps.

"The Canadian government is poised to abandon the precautionary principle, one of the key milestones achieved at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992", said Maude Barlow, Chairperson for the Council of Canadians, a public interest watch-dog based in Canada. "This will make Canada, alongside the United States, a killer of real sustainable development and put the World Trade Organisation in its place. It will force southern nations to turn over their agriculture and resources, in particular water, to the waiting hands of corporations."

The precautionary principle is already being branded by the WTO as a barrier to trade and many international trade agreements have formally rejected the concept.

"In the lead-up to the WSSD we have seen countries like the U.S. and Canada pushing hard for the trade rules of the WTO to commandeer the initiatives begun 10 years ago in Rio", said Tony Clarke, Director of the Polaris Institute, a Canada-based organisation that leads critical research and education on globalisation and corporations. "Some of the world's biggest corporations are here to convince us that the environment can be left in their hands through trade rules that restrict government authority."

Johannesburg has more and more the feeling of a trade summit rather than a sustainable development summit. The United Nations also announced today, as its first major announcement, the approval of over 200 public-private partnerships to "promote" sustainable developments.

The Polaris Institute and the Council of Canadians are part of an international contingent of groups monitoring the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. They have studied the Rio Agreement of 1992 and its implementation as well as the negotiations conducted prior to the Johannesburg Summit.

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