Partnership Plan Draws Fire

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Taking the stage at a U.N. summit Thursday, the Bush administration struck a challenging tone as it rolled out its “new approach” to reduce poverty and protect the environment through partnerships with businesses, international groups and friendly countries.

“The United States is the world’s leader in sustainable development,” said Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky, as she listed initiatives ranging from protecting Congo’s rain forest to providing clean water and energy to the poor. “No other nation has made a greater and more concrete commitment.”

But a skeptical crowd quickly pounced on the proposals, suggesting that a global commitment rather than a few pilot projects is expected from the world’s richest nation.

“Solving the problems of some villages is not an appropriate stance for the United States,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “It puts us at risk in our foreign policy. We cannot lead the world in a war against terrorism if we don’t lead the world in the war on poverty, disease and environmental degradation.”

Although President Bush has not joined other leaders at the 10-day World Summit on Sustainable Development, his policies dominate the discussions. U.S. negotiators, representing a country that emits about one-quarter of globe-warming gases, are resisting pressure from European nations to set dates and targets to reduce reliance on fossil fuels or develop other preservation strategies.

But the Bush administration has embraced a United Nations-sponsored effort to set up partnerships that immediately begin to work on specific environmental or poverty issues in hopes that momentum will build.

In unveiling the U.S.-led partnerships, Dobriansky ridiculed efforts to draft a global implementation plan for goals adopted by the U.S. and other nations a decade ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The document, she said, “now runs to some 30,000 words.”

“Words are good. Actions are better,” Dobriansky said. “Only concrete actions can prevent children from contracting water-borne diseases, allow families to cook meals indoors without risking fatal respiratory illnesses [or] protect delicate African ecosystems.”

These problems are the focus of some of the administration’s proposed partnerships unveiled Thursday. Others ranged from growing bird-friendly “shade coffee” in a partnership with Starbucks and government agencies to providing $15 million in a partnership with an unidentified U.S. sponsor and a South African bank to finance the building of 90,000 homes in South Africa.

Partnerships have been popping up among nations and nonprofit groups frustrated by a lack of progress since the Rio summit. Some are small in scope, such as a $300,000 investment that provided 2,500 subsistence farmers in Kenya with honey-producing beehives. Others are bigger, such as collaboration among U.N. organizations, governments, British Petroleum and the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council to phase out leaded and high-sulfur gasolines and diesel fuel worldwide.

The Bush administration has hinted at its partnerships for weeks, building up expectations among government officials and environmental activists, who gathered Thursday to pore over the details.

“It’s sad that [the Bush administration] didn’t go further and say the United States is going to make a major investment to address these problems,” said Jacob Scherr, director of international programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

David Hales, a political advisor to the nonprofit Stakeholder Forum, said he was trying to figure out how the Bush administration’s Congo Basin Forest Partnership differed from a similar program he ran under the Clinton administration.

“It’s hard to protect the second-largest rain forest in the world,” Hales said. “It takes a lot of money. The way you do this is not with a few forestry projects, but by tackling the causes of deforestation: reducing poverty, stabilizing governments, building integrated watershed management.”

Some of Bush’s proposals take aim at huge problems, such as AIDS, cutting hunger in Africa and bringing clean water and sanitation to impoverished communities throughout the Third World.

At a news conference, a panel of 13 administration officials said they could not say how much new funding was being proposed or how much was being shifted from existing programs. Under exasperated quizzing from British reporters, one of whom complained that the answers “strained credulity,” Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, blurted out, “It’s not a huge amount of money.”

Some members of Congress and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a former California governor, held a separate news conference to declare that Bush’s views do not reflect those of all Americans.

“Of course you are embarrassed when you don’t have committed U.S. leadership on these issues,” said Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from Martinez, Calif.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said the administration had simply cribbed earlier ideas and shuffled money around for the partnerships.

“At least they have picked up one theme of the summit,” Blumenauer said. “They’re recycling. They’re recycling money and they are recycling ideas.”