More than 30 Taiwanese officials arrived in Johannesburg yesterday for the official launch of the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).
At the first logistics and strategy meeting held at the Golden Reef City Casino Hotel yesterday morning, Yeh Jiunn-rong (
"We hope to connect Taiwan's issues, which will drive the country toward the future, to those in other countries," Yeh said.
Yeh said the Taiwanese officials would focus on issues discussed at the summit and side events according to their specialty.
The UN has identified five specific areas where concrete results are both essential and achievable. They are water and sanitation, energy, agricultural productivity, biodiversity and ecosystem management and health.
High-ranking Taiwanese officials in the group include Environmental Protection Administrator Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), Deputy Director of Water Resources Agency (WRA) Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢) and Vice Chairman of the Public Construction Commission Kuo Ching-chiang (郭清江). In addition, Eugene Jao (趙永清), a DPP lawmaker, is representing the Legislative Yuan.
Yesterday, an ad titled "Taiwan is here" was printed in the Summit Star, a national newspaper that is producing a special daily edition for the WSSD.
The global summit opened with a call for coordinated international action to fight poverty and protect the global environment.
"The peoples of the world expect that this world summit will live up to its promise of being a fitting culmination to a decade of hope," South African President Thabo Mbeki told delegates at the opening session.
"A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable," he said.
Mbeki, who said on Sunday that "global apartheid" must go the same way as white minority rule in South Africa, criticized the failure of governments to act on pledges made 10 years ago in Rio de Janeiro to pursue environmentally friendly prosperity.
The 10-day summit -- which with 65,000 delegates is the largest in UN history -- hopes to halve the more than 1 billion people without access to clean water and the more than 2 billion without proper sanitation.
It aims to develop specific plans to expand access to electricity and healthcare for poor people, to reverse the degradation of agricultural land and to protect the global environment.
Taiwanese officials, whose business cards were replaced with those representing major groups (NGOs) recognized by the UN, registered at the summit yesterday afternoon.
Meanwhile, wearing uniforms with a logo of Taiwan's indigenous butterfly, more than two dozen Taiwanese activists from NGOs yesterday enter the WSSD convention center to participate in the opening.
At a session on renewable energy, Lai Wei-chieh (賴偉傑), from the Taiwan-based Green Citizen Action Alliance, gave a talk about Taiwanese grassroots groups and their fight against energy policies that rely on traditional fossil fuel.
At the hearing, Lai spoke about Kungliao activists and their resistance to the establishment of a nuclear power plant, whose nuclear reactors and power generators were designed by the US but will be built by Japanese firms.
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