The billboard lists four world leaders whose political and environmental policies have not merited the highest marks in the eyes of the local radio station.

The message reads: "Castro, Mugabe, Qaddafi, Blair. There goes the neighbourhood."

All four leaders will join more than 110 others in Johannesburg Monday for the ceremonial opening of the high-level segment of the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD).

The billboard, however, has left out US President George W. Bush since he has decided to skip the summit much to the disappointment of South African President Thabo Mbeki who is playing host to a mega UN conference 10 years after the historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Although he is described as one of America's most environmentally unfriendly presidents, Bush escaped the company of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi and Britain's Tony Blair.

But still one of America's foremost stand-up comedians Jay Leno has refused to spare Bush for his lack of understanding of global environmental problems and also for his close ties to big business accused of environmental degradation.

Leno says that when Bush was once asked what his answer was to global warming, the US president responded: "Gobal Warming? Well, we should have more and more air conditioners."

Mercifully, it was only a joke.

The WSSD is billed as the largest UN gathering ever because there are 190 countries participating in the summit along with over 110 world leaders.

As the mother of all UN conferences, the Johannesburg summit is expected to produce a global plan of action to save the world from environmental destruction.

But unfortunately, like most other UN conferences, the WSSD is going to be just another exercise in political futility.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that 10 years after Rio, the global environment has continued to deteriorate. The gains have been minimal, the losses unfathomable.

The rise in population, the destruction of biodiversity, the pollution of the atmosphere, and the quantum leap in the consumption of natural resources continue unabated.

At least 15 percent of the world's population living in rich countries now account for 56 percent of total global consumption, while the poorest 40 percent in low income countries, account for only 11 percent of total consumption.

Meanwhile, the huge gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen threatening and destabilising countries all over the world.

Jeffrey Sachs, an outspoken senior adviser to Annan and a professor of sustainable development at New York's prestigious Columbia University, says that it will be a great disappointment if the WSSD does not come up with new financial commitments to fight global poverty.

At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189 world leaders made specific commitments and pledged time-limited goals to fight hunger, disease and environmental degradation by the year 2015. But the promises have fallen far short of their targets.

"We need money" and lots of money to meet these goals. But this money, he said, is not forthcoming.

The international community needs new commitments, not a recycling of old commitments.

And if UN conferences are being dismissed as "talking shops," he said, donor nations have to take the blame for it. That description, Sachs added, is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the rich and the powerful.

He said there are people who are asking: "What is the United Nations doing holding these meetings?"

Sachs singled out the US for special criticism because Washington was abandoning the global war against poverty and gearing itself for a potential new war in the Middle East.

The US, the world's richest country with a $10 trillion economy, has already decided it will not pledge any new financial resources at the summit.
Asked whether the US would put new money on the table at WSSD, Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), said that new financial commitments should be really made in the field, "not at international conferences," ruling out any new US pledges at WSSD.

Since the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, the 133 developing nations of the Group of 77 have also been pushing for a global fund to eradicate poverty.

The proposal, which has been kicked around the UN system since then, has re-surfaced in the draft plan of action for WSSD.

According to Article II para 6 (b) of the draft document, the proposed voluntary fund is aimed at eradicating poverty and promoting social and human development in developing nations.

But the proposal is in danger of being killed because of strong opposition both from the US and the European Union which say there is no need to create new funds to help the world's poor.

Sachs said the total gross national product (GNP) of rich nations was about $25 trillion annually.

If a single penny is set aside for the world's poor, there could be a $25 billion global fund to fight poverty and disease in the world's poorer nations "and save eight billion lives."
By providing increased financial resources, he said, rich nations will also be doing more for themselves than for the poor because they need "to live in a world of stability and prosperity."

But rich countries don't seem to heed the warning.

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