SENATOR A J Nicholson, head of Jamaica’s delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development now taking place here has cautioned Jamaicans against being overly optimistic about the outcomes of the meeting.

“It’s a work in progress and we ought not to believe that at the end of the summit we are going to have every ‘I’ dotted and every ‘T’ crossed,” Nicholson said Monday after a closed door meeting of delegates from Caribbean Community (Caricom) member states.

“What we should come out of this conference with is a framework within which the implementation process can be strengthened. That is the way that the process should move,” he said.

Caricom delegates have supported summit president Thabo Mbeki’s appeal that representatives from the more that 100 countries gathered at the conference should use the opportunity to tackle global apartheid.

Opening the first plenary session Monday, Mbeki likened the struggle for sustainable development and global equality to South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.

Nicholson admitted that implementation of the objectives adopted at the Rio Earth Conference 10 years ago has “not got off the ground as we would have wished”. However, he said the aim of delegates from the region will be to strengthen the implementation process.

Issues such as the strengthening of institutional capacity, finance and the debt burden will be high on the agenda and Caricom will, in the negotiations, be choosing strategic partners at the government, private sector and non-governmental levels.

Tuesday’s summit agenda items included partnership plenaries on the themes of agriculture, finance, trade, technology transfer, consumption patterns and capacity building, among other matters.

Caricom is negotiating at the summit through the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS) and the Group of 77 (G77).

Describing the talks so far as “not holistic”, Senator Nicholson was pragmatic in his assessment of how the next week-and-a-half of negotiations will unfold.

“Not everyone has the same agenda,” he said. “We must find a way of swapping and understanding the needs of others so that we can buy our way into that strategic setting, knowing everyone is looking out for himself.”

The blueprint for negotiations at the summit is the draft implementation plan that emerged from the last Preparatory Committee meeting in Bali, Indonesia.

About three-quarters of the text has been agreed upon, while the remaining text is still under negotiation. The unresolved areas concern some of the most difficult issues, including provisions relating to trade and finance and the setting of new implementation timetables and targets.

The sticking points in the private negotiations are said to reflect the differing needs and perspectives of developing and developed countries, as well as various regional concerns. So hard are the issues, that this past weekend was used as additional working days for negotiations which are expected to continue late into the nights during this summit.

The matter of trade and finance has been taken out of the usual process and sent to a special Contact Group for deliberation. Antiguan ambassador, John Ash, was elected at the first plenary to head the group.

Jamaica’s eight-member delegation includes Planning Institute of Jamaica boss Dr Wesley Hughes; National Environment and Planning Agency CEO Franklin McDonald; Bevon Morrison, president of the Jamaican Society of Scientists and Technologists; and Professor Al Binger of the University of the West Indies Centre for Environment and Development.