Diversity Summit is a Failure, Critics Say

Diplomats from 182 countries wrangled over details of a statement on the future of the world's forests yesterday as the biodiversity convention meeting in the Hague ended in what critics described as abject failure.

This 10th anniversary gathering - the sixth time the convention has convened since it was set up at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 - was supposed to show real progress in the fight to prevent the continued mass extinction of plants and animals as forests are destroyed and natural systems polluted and degraded.

A statement agreed by 120 ministers at the close of the conference acknowledged that "biological diversity is being destroyed by human activities at unprecedented rates", but produced few concrete plans to prevent it happening.

The only aim agreed was to have "instruments in place to stop and reverse the current alarming biodiversity loss at the global, regional, sub-regional and national levels by the year 2010".

The statement is due to go to the Rio+10 summit in Johannesburg in August, which is to review progress on environment and sustainable development in the past 10 years.

At the convention's inception it was hoped that a forest agreement would soon be reached.

After years of effort, the whole issue was handed over to the biodiversity convention to sort out, and it has still not been achieved.

Countries such as Brazil and Malaysia have refused point blank to have controls placed on their forestry activities by the international community.

Joy Hyvarinen, international treaties adviser at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and a veteran of convention meetings, said: "After 10 years of these meetings there is no impact I can discern on slowing down the destruction of the natural world, but they have set up a wonderful bureaucracy for discussing it.

"The issue is vitally important but it is a real pity not to have been able to better than this."

She said that Birdlife International, of which RSPB is a member, was reconsidering its attendance at the meetings, adding: "This conference has been a disaster and an abject failure. Our resources and effort are better spent elsewhere."

The only bright spot for the convention was an agreement on access to genetic resources so that medicinal plants can be exploited and compensation paid to both the countries of origin and the drug companies that exploit them.