Each year since Rio, CSD highlights the need for eliminating destructive subsidies. However, over US$ 650 billion a year of the public’s financial resources is invested by governments in programs encouraging unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, as well as unsustainable trade and investment. While everyone agrees this is a problem, why is there so little progress in addressing it?
Recently in Nairobi, the Expert Group meeting on Finance for Sustainable Development pointed out that “the removal of subsidies is extremely difficult politically.” While CSD delegates are quite aware of the strong political pressures applied by industry groups opposing subsidy removal, they are often constrained to address or freely discuss this obstacle. Aside from the political influence by industry interest groups, another obstacle is the lack of media attention that would inform the public of the environmental degradation and threats to public health and safety, which their tax payments are financing. Understandably, when citizens learn about how badly their taxes are being used they often feel betrayed. We NGOs therefore applaud the Secretary General’s report recommending “a careful review of the nature and extent of major subsidies in order to identify the gainers and losers” and for “a regular report that identifies a country’s major subsidies and provides estimates of their real total costs.”
In order for these country reports to be truly transparent and to adequately inform the public on the actual impacts of the taxes they pay, governments should not only provide meaningful information on their subsidies but also seek and provide for public input, receiving meaningful information from those stakeholders whose quality of life may be directly affected by those subsidies.
In addition to currently established channels available to business and industry groups to communicate the economic hardships of proposed subsidy elimination, governments need to establish adequate input channels for the people paying the bill – as well as the suffering the externalized costs to their health and environment.
We therefore recommend:
· That in undertaking the proposed review of the impacts of major subsidies, member governments will not only produce but make available to the public regular reports on their subsidies and to what degree they contribute to or undermine sustainable development and quality of life.
· For member governments to provide the necessary communication channels to allow the public and especially those groups most directly harmed by subsidized programs, to provide timely input into these reports and reviews.
· To make public and transparent these inputs, including active lobbying campaigns and other efforts from industry, academia and the public, to eliminate or protect government subsidies.
· To organize a multi-stakeholder meeting at the Ninth Session of CSD in 2001, to identify, examine and discuss viable actions for eliminating unsustainable subsidies in energy and transportation.