Earth Summit dreams of creating a bold new blueprint to save the planet are fading as haggling between rich and poor governments mutes hopes of firm new timetables or hard cash to help ease poverty.

The ten-day summit, the biggest UN meeting ever in Africa, opened on Monday with South African President Thabo Mbeki saying that the peoples of the world expected it to create no less than “a new global society that is caring and humane”.

But behind the grand hopes, summit goals of halving poverty by 2015 through promoting economic growth that does not damage the environment look increasingly elusive because of a persistent North-South divide.

In sessions behind closed doors, ministers from the United States and the European Union are opposing calls for new cash for developing nations after agreeing to raise aid at a UN summit in Monterrey, Mexico, in March.

And Washington opposes setting new environmental targets beyond previously agreed UN goals, such as halving the proportion of the world’s people who live on less than a dollar a day or who lack access to drinking water.

“Obviously there are issues, there’s tension and dialogue, that’s inherent (between) the North and South,” conceded a senior member of the US delegation.

Others are more scathing.

“This is not the way you make history,” said Remi Parmentier, political director of international environmental lobby group Greenpeace.

Poor nations fear they will end up with a vague and non-committal document that will do little to improve the lives of billions who lack access to essential services including water, energy and healthcare.

A big problem is that promises made at a Rio de Janeiro summit a decade ago, when the world first came together to try to merge environmentalism and Third World development after the Cold War, have not been fully kept.

Rio included landmark conventions on limiting global warming and to protect the diversity of species. Johannesburg’s World Summit on Sustainable Development has no similar conventions.

The convention to limit emissions of “greenhouse gases” has been undermined by a US pullout by President George W. Bush. Bush will not be among about 100 leaders at the summit’s finale, preferring to focus on the economy and the fight against terror.

Wary of the lessons of Rio, even at the opening ceremony speakers were looking beyond the haggling among governments to insist the key was not words but implementing any agreements.

Mbeki said that world leaders would have to make “an honest pledge” to carry out the programme of action in a 77-page draft document.

These include urging developed nations to make “concrete efforts” to raise aid to 0.7 percent of their income, a goal first set in 1970 and never met. Aid totals about 0.22 percent.

Mbeki also said the North-South divide was widening and warned delegates that the world should act to halt a slide towards “the most primitive condition of the animal world, the survival of the fittest”.

Despite the gloom, many experts say that the summit is a necessary contribution in a grand scheme to manage history — a once in a decade bid to merge global policies on everything from trade and energy to agriculture and healthcare.

And one innovation could be a plan to allow companies, non-government organisations and local authorities to take responsibility for implementing plans ranging from better hospitals to building windmills to boost renewable energy. -- Reuters