Renata Giraldi and Carolina Gonçalves      Special Envoys Agência Brasil

Rio de Janeiro – Brazil’s minister of Environment, Izabella Teixeira, came out in defense of the Rio+20 final document saying that it made progress in a number of areas, such as biodiversity protection, new metrics for measuring the wealth of nations, regulating the use of oceans and poverty eradication.

But the minister admitted that the principal difficulty was to convince rich nations to make financial commitments.

“There were some problems, yes, in getting developed countries to allocate more money,” said the minister, referring to the hard negotiations due mainly to resistance by countries in the European Union, along with the United States and Japan, that cited difficulties caused by the international economic crisis.

Teixeira pointed out that in the negotiations on the wording of the final document Brazil insisted on the phrase, “reproductive rights for women,” and fought for specific definitions on goals, objectives and financing. However, she said, lack of agreement led to the absence of those items.

The “final document” was formally presented on Tuesday, June 19. Yesterday, Wednesday, June 20, it was criticized during most of the day by foreign leaders as well as representatives of NGOs, activist movements and civil society associations. Spokespersons for NGOs went so far as to demand that a reference to their acceptance of the document be removed from the text.

The executive secretary of the Brazilian delegation, ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, pointed out that there was no such resistance when the negotiations on the final text were completed on June 19.

“We have a document that is the result of a collective effort. It is not the work of just any one country,” said the ambassador.

Live multimedia coverage of the Rio+20 conference is available at the EBC website (in Portuguese): Acompanhe a cobertura multimídia da Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC) na Rio+20.

 Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English

Link - Izabella Teixeira defende texto final da Rio+20 mas admite dificuldade em convencer países ricos a colaborar