Cuba Defends Sustainable Development

Beijing, Sep 7. -Cuba defends sustainable development as a goal humanity should never renounce, said expert Gisela Alonso, leading up a UN symposium in Beijing.Alonso, who is also president of the Cuban Environmental Agency, told reporters that the two-day high level meeting, which starts Thursday in this capital, will prepare for the Rio+20 Summit.

The meeting is organized by the Chinese government and a UN commission responsible for the June 4-6 UN Conference on Sustainable Development next year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

According to Alonso, participants in the Beijing symposium will discuss sustainable development and try to reach a consensus for facilitating proposed agreements at the coming Earth Summit.

The challenge of this summit, which will be held 20 years after the first Earth Summit in 1992, and 10 years after the Johannesburg summit in 2002, is a much larger one, because it must find solutions to more complex scenarios, she noted.

Alonso listed the financial crisis; the increasingly critical situation of food security worldwide, something about which the FAO is constantly warning; and patterns of production and consumption inherent to the capitalist system, still unchanged.

Regarding her Cuba's stance, Alonso said that the agreements passed in 1992 were still valid in the economic, social and environmental aspects. (Prensa Latina)