Rio Plus Ten: Politics, Poverty and the Environment

Poverty and the environment are inseparable, proclaim Middleton and O'Keefe, not rival priorities, and say furthermore that purely or mainly environmental agendas frequently ignore the needs and rights of poor people. In that context, they trace the efforts that led to the United Nations conferences on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. They say the almost universal condemnation of the latter by international non-government organizations was based on the deception that market-led economies can actually improve the plight of the poor. It is finance capital that creates and maintains poverty, they say. Distributed in the US by Stylus. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR