PARIS (AFP) — A secret club of seven wealthy countries plotted to hamstring the United Nations’ first conference on the environment in 1972 to protect their economic interests, New Scientist reports in Saturday’s issue.

The “cabal”, which called itself the Brussels Group, comprised Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the United States, the British weekly says.

Representatives from these countries held a series of secret meetings in the run-up to the 1972 Stockholm Conference in which they decided to crimp the ambitious agenda of environmentalists and disregard concerns for the Third World, it says.

New Scientist says the evidence comes from papers that have just been released under Britain’s “30-year Rule”, under which confidential official documents must be placed in the public domain after three decades unless they relate to vital national security.

A note written by a British Foreign Office civil servant after an early meeting in July 1971 described the Brussels Group as “an unofficial policy-making body to concert the views of the principal governments concerned.”

“It will have to remain informal and confidential,” the note warned.

Referring to the likelihood of criticism “from the Swedes and others,” it urged that the group “not… include awkward bedfellows”.

The 1972 forum, formally called the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, was the first global conference on environment perils.

The conference secretariat was headed by Maurice Strong, then head of the Canadian foreign aid agency.

He campaigned hard for the agenda to be broad and ambitious and embrace issues that, today, are mainstream concerns, such as deforestation, urbanisation and development in poorer countries.

But, according to the confidential papers, lobbying by the Brussels Group ensured that the agenda was limited to a small number of subjects, such as cross-border pollution, and did not touch trade or economic activities.

Britain, for its part, campaigned on behalf of the controversial Franco-British supersonic jet Concorde, still in production at the time, the report said.

At the top of its list of subjects that it wanted excluded from Stockholm’s Action Plan were controls on sonic booms and pollution in the upper atmosphere.

At that time, Concorde was in deep commercial trouble for only the British and French national airlines were willing to buy it, and arguments were raging as to whether the noisy, smoke-spewing aircraft would be allowed to land in New York.

A European Union environment official told AFP he had never heard of the Brussels Group, but added he was unsurprised that the rich countries at that time should have moved to crimp the agenda.

Although the Stockholm Conference’s achievements are largely limited to high-minded declarations, the event at least launched a new agency, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

It also set an invaluable precedent for further initiatives on the environment, on issues ranging from the ozone layer to deforestation, fresh water and global warming.