India’s PM takes dig at West over gas emissions

Times of India: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday complained that the western nations have not lived up to their commitments for technology transfer and additional financing since the Rio Conference in 1992. He called for a global action plan to promote both food and energy security. Gas emissions of developed countries is actually rising and progress of the Kyoto Protocol has been slow, Singh told leaders of 43 nations attending the seventh Asia Europe Meeting here on Saturday.

"We should call upon our European partners to do more in this regard. The developing world is committed to doing its share," Singh said. But he also noted that the principle of convergence of per-capita emissions of developing countries with advanced developed countries is gaining wider acceptance. "We should recognize that each citizen of the world has equal entitlement to the global atmospheric space," he said.

The prime minister said that common but differentiated responsibility of developed and underdeveloped nations on environmental issues should be the cardinal principle of negotiations to find practical and pragmatic solutions within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Speaking on the concluding of the two-day ASEM7 meeting, he said poverty eradication at a wide scale in Asia will require collaborative global effort to promote development and in particular to create job opportunities. "If we fail, we will continue to live in a world of instability and conflict," Singh said.

India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, shot by Ricardo Stuckert/PR for Agencia Brasil, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons License Attribution 2.5 Brazil)