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January 18, 2001
For the 8th Session of the CSD, SPAC Caucus members agreed to work collaboratively in a supportive role with the three NGO Caucuses on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, Forests and Finance. Several key Caucus members worked directly within or with each of these caucuses, bringing in sustainable production and consumption perspectives.
While production and consumption, along with poverty, is officially acknowledged by the CSD to be one of the major cross-cutting issues of sustainable development, many still regard production and consumption as a separate issue rather than a useful way of understanding and addressing the systemic obstacles and opportunities cutting across food security, deforestation, fresh water, energy, finance and other parts of the sustainable development agenda.
Thus, our contributions, through articles, concept papers, and interventions to this year’s discussions of food security, forests and finance emphasized the need in each of these issues for civil society groups to confront the systemic obstacles preventing progress. Some example include:
q reforming destructive subsidies and making public investments in the private sector more transparent (often forgotten in critiques of diminishing ODA and the demand for “new resources;”)
q ensuring greater accountability within the corporate sector, while encouraging efforts towards greater corporate responsibility;
q analyzing and addressing the destructive impacts of advertising and marketing, especially in developing countries (as called for the previous year by the G77);
q providing meaningful knowledge to consumers and citizens about the impacts of products, production processes and producers (e.g., regarding GMOs, pesticides, tree farming); and
q ending the marginalization of sustainability by governments in favor of policies promoting sales (i.e., trade), and unconstrained economic growth.
In addition to its collaboration with other issue caucuses, the SPAC Caucus also began the discussion of the implementation of the revised UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection and their applicability to many of the CSD’s policy discussions. The Caucus also discussed strategies for developing the SPAC Watch initiative to promote collaboration among NGOs in monitoring national and international progress towards sustainable production and consumption policies and practices.
In discussions at and following CSD8 SPAC Caucus members discussed the idea of addressing the topic of the production and consumption of food at CSD9. In particular, the idea is to organize a side event examining the advertising and marketing of junk foods to children in developing countries. This point, to be presented within the context of the discussions on Information for Decision-making, reasserts the need for the UN and member governments to respond to the G77’s call to study the impact of advertising in developing countries. The SPAC Caucus may collaborate with the Corporate Accountability Caucus in also exploring the effectiveness of voluntary codes on advertising and marketing, in response to the CSD7 Resolution to examine the role of voluntary initiatives and agreements in developing countries.
For Rio+10, SPAC Caucus members have organized workshops and presentations in various regions coordinating efforts through the SPAC Watch initiative to provide an NGO assessment of progress on sustainable production and consumption policies and practices. The initiative will focus special attention on the implementation of the commitment made by governments at Rio to develop national policy frameworks on sustainable production and consumption. The initiative will coordinate NGO experiences and assessments in different countries, examining production and consumption topics cutting across different CSD issue areas. In addition to this assessment, NGO Caucus members intend to provide the UN General Assembly and CSD with a number of recommendations on actions for implementing the Rio commitments to promoting sustainable production and consumption.
There will also be an assessment of the areas of international cooperation necessary to promote sustainable production and consumption. This includes international mechanisms for technology assessment (environmental, health and social) when technology is moved across borders.