America Is Just Observing… It Might Be A Just Talking Festival

▽Poverty and Inequality=Poverty is the cause of almost every social problems such as hunger, disease, human traffic, and racial complications. There are 2.8 billion people in the world who live with less than 2 dollars a day, and 30% of the whole population is suffering from undernourishment.

The top 15% possesses 80% of world’s wealth and that is concentrated in the developed countries. The poor countries hope that the developed countries increase the public development aids up to 0.7% of their GDP, support the poorest countries, and forgive their debts; however, it is uncertain whether the developed countries comply with that or not.

▽Drinking Water Supply=The world’s population increased by twice in last 50 years but the water usage increased by 6 times; therefore, 40% of the world’s population is suffering from shortage of water.

In 2025, the two thirds of the world’s population will live in countries with scarcities of water. We should keep on eye on whether they can agree to reduce the people who suffer from the shortage of drinking water by half until 2015.

▽Energy=The fossil fuel, the principal offender of the global warming, supplies 80% of the total energy, and the amount of carbon emission has been increased 4 times in last 50 years, there are 6 billion tons are emitted every year.

There are discussions going on about gradually abolishing the energy subsidies and increasing the ratio of the reproducible energies by at least 15%.

Especially, there will be criticisms concentrated on the USA, which withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol last March although it discharges 24% of the world’s carbon dioxide emission.

▽Others and the USA=Beside all those, each country has different opinions about reducing various kinds of subsidies that are environmentally harmful and distort the trade structure, import prohibition based on environment, and putting off the decreasing rate of the biological diversity until 2010.

There are some pessimistic outlooks about the outcome of this conference that since the economic super power and the biggest pollution induction company America is consistent with passive attitudes, this meeting will be over with many discussions and no specific agreement. The US President George W. Bush did not attend this conference.

Hye-Yoon Park parkhyey@donga.com