From June 18 to 23, 2012, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will host the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), commemorating 20 years since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit or Rio '92.
This historic meeting marked the beginning of the movement to compel the industrialized countries to accept their responsibility – also historic – for climate change. This in turn led to the popular struggles for the recognition of the industrialized North's environmental and climate debt to the countries of the South, inverting the logic of the prevailing view of “debt”, which was limited to the financial debts owed by the governments of the South to the countries of the North and the financial institutions that they control.
However, these developments were accompanied by an accelerated process of the commodification of life and nature, through false solutions both to climate change – in the form of carbon markets – and to biodiversity loss – in the form of so-called innovative financial mechanisms.
“Given this reality, we need to turn Río+20 into a strong process of global mobilization that confronts the reality of a system of death that will stop at nothing to perpetuate itself, and strengthens our resistance and struggles for survival through the building of non-capitalist alternatives, such as food sovereignty,” declare the organizations, networks and social movements involved in the building of the “Peoples' Summit for social and environmental justice, against the commodification of life and nature in defense of the commons”, to be held at the same time and in the same city as Río+20.
The organizers of the summit call on “peoples and movements struggling against all forms of exploitation, depredation and domination, to join with us in building the Permanent Peoples' Assembly, in order to affirm our rights and those of nature against the commodification of life and the greenwashing of capitalism, under the rhetoric of the ‘green economy'."
To add your support to the initiative, contact the organizers throughmovilizacion.rio20@gmail.com. The full text of the call for mobilization is available here: http://wrm.org.uy/RIO+20/Mobilize_together.html
