Major's reassurance fails to move Bush
We do not have an open pocket book, says US President on financing
CAMP DAVID (Maryland) —US President George Bush said that he would refuse to sign a key Earth Summit treaty although British Prime Minister John Major told him over the weekend that he believed some problems with the agreement could be resolved.
At a news conference wrapping up two days of talks at the President’s mountaintop retreat on Sunday, Mr Bush reiterated his view that the treaty failed to protect a nation’s rights to develop resources in new ways and that it could place too large a financial burden on the US.
"I will not sign that treaty as it sits on the table now."
The US has angered some nations at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro by taking a hard line on major treaties, fearing they would hurt American jobs and be too costly.
One key treaty on "biodiversity" is aimed at protecting plants, animals and natural resources. Mr Bush said the financing aspects of the treaty were "too open-ended" and that he did not want to make a commitment that perhaps the US could not keep.
"We do not have an open pocket book," he said.
Mr Major told reporters that Britain and other members of the Group of Seven major industrialized countries had problems with the treaty, such as protection of intellectual property and financing.
"They seem to call for very substantial commitment without perhaps some of the commitments as to how and where the money is going to be used," he said.
But he said: "I think we’ll probably be able to solve them. But the difficulties that we instinctively see with them are a good deal less than the United States faces."
Washington was worried that the text could be interpreted as committing industrialized countries to hand over unlimited funds to help poorer nations preserve tropical forests and other ecosystems rich in plant and animal species.
It also objects that biotechnology companies that have developed new products from materials culled in resource-rich countries would have to share the benefits with them.
Mr Major, who was to go to Rio today, was to meet top Bush administration officials and congressional leaders yesterday, in his first visit to Washington since his re-election this spring. The visit was billed as a cementing of the traditionally close relationship between the two nations.
Meanwhile, embattled US environment chief Mr William Reilly said on Sunday that he hoped efforts would be made later to bring the US into a convention on protecting endangered animals and plants that Mr Bush had refused to sign.
Mr Reilly, US delegation leader and administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency, sent a confidential memo to Mr Bush last week asking him to reverse his position and sign the biodiversity convention, but was rebuffed by White House aides.
The leak of that memo to the New York Times caused him intense embarrassment at the conference, where 178 nations were working on texts designed to save the planet from ecological catastrophe.
It followed harsh criticism of the US for forcing the elimination of a timetable on reducing carbon dioxide emissions in a convention on greenhouse gases.
"We will support biological diversity in the rest of the world just as though we were a treaty participant," Mr Reilly declared after planting an endangered Brazil nut tree in Rio’s botanical gardens.
In Washington, Mr Bush said on Sunday that he would like to dismiss the official who made public a confidential memo suggesting revisions that might reverse the American position on an international treaty to protect plants and animals. — Reuter, AFP, NYT.
Source : The Straits Times, June 9, 1992
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