Judy Beals is the Campaigns Director at Oxfam America.

In the past six weeks, world leaders met not once, not twice, but three times to discuss and deliver global solutions to global challenges. The G8, the G20 and Rio+20 received scant media attention during this election year dominated by domestic issues. And while global summits generally deliver more snooze than sizzle, they continue to matter, bringing together heads of state to discuss and, at least potentially, to bring global attention, resources and commitment to the world’s poorest.

With nearly a billion people hungry (including 18 million people in West Africa facing a massive unfolding food crisis), increasingly erratic weather, and a weak global economy, the need for shared solutions to shared problems could not be greater. But world leaders failed to rise to the challenge.

Oxfam stunt before the G8

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 10

G8 Leaders look lost looking for food security—signs for shortcuts and silver bullets distract them from the path. Photo: Oxfam America.

As host to the G8—or Group of 8—the US was perhaps best positioned to deliver substantial commitments, especially since President Obama had put global food security squarely on the agenda. But meeting in the secluded Camp David, Maryland, the world’s largest industrialized economies passed the buck. Instead, the G8 tried to fill the gap of their broken promises with a private sector initiative that simply cannot tackle the complex challenges of food insecurity. Only the US recommitted itself to an important initiative started three years ago at the G8 Summit in L’Aquila. On the bright side, some commitments were made to replenish the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), a multi-donor plan that invests in developing country agriculture.

The G20—the group of the world’s 20 major economies—arguably delivered even less. Still relatively new, the G20 has been meeting at the head of state level since 2008 to discuss key issues in the global economy and to promote “strong, sustainable and balanced growth.” Despite opportunities this year to address drivers of food crises—including commodity price volatility and increased demand for biofuels—G20 leaders assembled in Los Cabos, Mexico were unable to move beyond internal disagreement over how to fix the Eurozone. The one bright spot was movement plugging the leak on hundreds of millions of dollars that drain out of poor countries into tax havens every year.

Coming 20 years after the first Earth Summit, Rio+20s ambitions were high to tackle ending poverty and achieving prosperity for all while living within the earth’s limits of fresh water, clean air, and fertile land. While the verdict on action by heads of state at Rio is rightly dismal—there too, at least if you looked hard enough, were glimmers of hope. UN General Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Zero Hunger Challenge was a welcome ray of hope. Even business leaders produced at least a few positive initiatives at the Corporate Sustainability Forum and the Business Action for Sustainable Development.

Overall, shockingly inadequate outcomes, given the scale and urgency of the challenges? Yes. But I bring a different view. We know that solutions DO exist—to bring about a small-scale agricultural revolution that can feed the 9 billion people who will inhabit this earth by 2050 without destroying the planet; to bring about a green energy revolution; to bring about a more just and sustainable global economy that benefits all of us.

What we face is something we CAN change: political will. And while there wasn’t anywhere near enough of it at Camp David, Los Cabos, or Rio, the growing insistence of civil society, north and south, especially young people, was undeniable.

Our supporters were there. People signed the G8 petition we delivered to President Obama, urging him to launch an ambitious food security partnership with small-scale farmers. Nearly half a million supporters tuned in for our G8 Twitter Town Hall, #G8chat . Before the G20 summit Oxfam supporters helped spread the word about what was at stake.Throughout the summits, our Twitter followers tweeted and retweeted via #DearG8, #TweetG20, and #Rioplus20 about progress (or lack thereof) that leaders were making on our key issues.

Our supporters became part of something that is gaining steam—a new awakening to citizen power—standing up, speaking loudly and clearly for our future. Social media is part of it, but members of our Oxfamily went further—holding events, signing petitions, making phone calls, speaking directly with elected officials, and insisting that their voices be heard.

And that’s exactly what we need to keep doing—building political will—holding leaders accountable and making sure the glitz of summits is matched by real commitments for poor people. GROWing a movement in the present, for now and for the future, like no other the world has ever seen. You can help us do that—by asking your friends, families and social networks to join our GROW campaign—by continuing to stand up, take action, and make your voices heard.

So here’s to summits attempted and at least partially scaled. We have mountains still to climb. Looking forward to our journey together.

Just back from Rio+20, where the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the draft agreement up for approval by heads of state has failed even the most pessimistic projections. Government negotiators have expressed their dismay and NGOs are widely condemning the event as a farce, or as Oxfam has put it: “Rio will go down as the hoax summit. They came, they talked, but they failed to act.”

Over at the Corporate Sustainability Forum (CSF) and Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD) events on the margins of the official Rio conference, the mood was decidedly different. The four-day gathering attracted over 2,500 business leaders and sustainability experts to laud private sector progress and launch new initiatives. While government leaders were wringing their hands, here a stream of corporate executives took the stage to call for greener economies and respect for human rights. The panel themes I took part in are indicative—business and water risks in times of conflict, climate change resiliency measures for small farmers, the need for sustainability expertise on corporate boards, and stakeholder expectations of businesses with respect to the human right to water and sanitation (full CSF agenda here).

The CSF’s official report directed to the UN General Secretary includes over 200 corporate and industry commitments and a variety of progressive public policy recommendations, including:

• “Make the Rio+20 conference the beginning of the end of all subsidies to fossil fuels and reorient subsidies towards clean and renewable energy”;
• Enforce human rights, labor, environmental, and good governance standards;
• Invest in agricultural productivity, particularly for smallholder farmers;
• Promote increased disclosure of integrated corporate sustainability information and require all public and private pension and investment funds (including sovereign wealth funds) to integrate environmental, social and governance factors into their operation.

Those recommendations were burnished by specific commitments, including calls by various CEO groupings for more transparency around environmental and social impacts (including a Natural Capital Declaration to “ integrate natural capital considerations into products and services”) and public commitments to water sustainability and access.

The social movements and NGOs gathered at the Peoples Summit across town dismissed these efforts out of hand. If anything, the more business talked the more “the people” objected. Friends of the Earth, La Via Campesina, Third World Network, and others delivered a petition to end “Corporate capture of the United Nations” and to resist market-based solutions as false promises that only serve to “further concentrate the control of corporations over land, resources and peoples’ lives.”

Among the corporate folks at the CSF/BASC events, there was a sense of frustration that business was being misunderstood by all sides – recalcitrant governments believing that stronger regulations and transparency are antithetical to business interests (and therefore being far too timid), and “radical” NGOs refusing to see anything good coming out of business-led initiatives. It’s easy to understand that frustration in the midst of all the clamor around new innovations and good corporate practice at the CSF/BASD, and there is no denying the fact that some business leaders are far ahead of governments in their public advocacy.

That said, for all the energy and promise of the CSF, there is a bit of a disconnect with the concerns of civil society. The explicit attention to human rights, transparency, and public policy engagement are welcome, but these discussions are too often separated from issues of accountability, power inequities, and political capture. Philanthropic initiatives and innovation still figure too prominently and are detached from core business practices and influence, as if a company’s good works could someone make up for harmful products, practices, or lobbying.

If your diagnosis is that we’re on the right course, but we’ve got to chip away at bad practices and scale up the good (and indeed the official theme of the BASD event was “scale up”), then there is much to cheer in the CSF/BASD events. If, on the other hand, your diagnosis is that we are going over a cliff and nothing short of major transformation will suffice—which is the implicit if not explicit diagnosis of all the major studies going into Rio+20—then we need to get to root causes quickly and avoid distractions.

Those root causes are not technological; they are fundamentally about power and politics. That’s not to diminish the good will and good efforts of many CSF/BASD participants, but to urge more focus on the real drivers of poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. There are reasons why governments are feckless and civil society is in the streets—and we won’t make much progress on sustainability until we address them.