Earth summit: Today Bali, tomorrow the world

It was a good gag: John Prescott jets off to paradise to save the planet. But, says Geoffrey Lean, Prezza is deep in a much bigger enterprise than donning his wetsuit

'Bali junket for Prezza", shouted the headlines. "John of Jaunt", "Fury at Prescott's £¼m Bali trip".

All good knockabout stuff, and the old bruiser, sitting in his House of Commons office on Wednesday as the synthetic storm raged outside, was quite prepared to hit back. "Piddling press prattle," he called it.

The rage – from a trade not noted for its eagerness to spurn freebies – soon subsided. The "fury" turned out to amount to no more than a few predictable soundbites from Tory MPs. But the tearoom tempest succeeded in publicising, for the first time, what could be one of the most important events of the decade.

No, that's not Prezza's trip to Bali. He had not been planning to go to the "luxurious oasis" in "paradise" in the first place. It has a lot more to do with Prescott's real destination that night. For on Wednesday evening he flew out to Johannesburg, on the first leg of a gruelling nine-day journey that included four nights on aeroplanes.

He went – on a personal invitation delivered by the country's President, Thabo Mbeki, in Downing Street earlier this month – to help save a summit scheduled for the gold-mining city late this summer. It is the latest episode in a little-noticed campaign by senior figures in the Government to "win the peace" against terror by launching the most concerted drive against Third World poverty in decades.

Tony Blair made a couple of quick references to the campaign in his Newsnight interviews last week but, extraordinarily, the Government has sought little credit for what is perhaps its single most progressive initiative.

The campaign is due to climax on 24 August at the Johannesburg meeting, which labours under the unwieldy title of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). It is the successor to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which launched the world's attempt to tackle global warming and such other threats as the rapid extinction of species and the wholescale loss of fertile soil through desertification.

The Rio summit established the environment on the international agenda. The hope is that WSSD will do the same for Third World development, and establish it on an environmentally sound, sustainable basis.

The need is acute enough. One billion people have to subsist on less than one dollar a day. Incomes have been steadily falling in Africa for decades; the average African is now worse off than in 1960 as commodity prices have fallen and population has increased.

Debt repayments and unfair terms of trade mean that – despite aid – more money now flows from poor countries to rich ones than the other way round.

Every 10 seconds a child dies from diseases caused by dirty drinking water – over three million children a year. Some two million people perish annually from smoke from their cooking fires because they cannot get modern forms of energy. And life expectancy in Africa is now 48, and falling.

Proposals before the summit urge the world's leaders to agree to halve the number of people in dire poverty, the number who are hungry, and the number without safe drinking water and sanitation by the year 2015. They also call for an "action programme" to provide modern energy services to those who lack them; in practice, these would often come from renewable such as solar and wind energy, which are distributed by nature and so can reach people far from electricity grids.

Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, last week also called on the leaders to resolve to tackle the desertification that now affects up to two-thirds of the world's agricultural regions, and the accelerating loss of species, now running at 1,000 times the natural rate of extinction.

The conference will address the waste of resources in rich countries. In a keynote speech about the summit, on the day of the Bali row last week, the environment minister, Michael Meacher, pointed out that, on average, each Western citizen uses one ton of resources a year, and that 11 further tons are wasted to provide it. Pressure groups want measures on corporate responsibility to induce good behaviour by companies.

It all adds up – in the words of Klaus Töpfer, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, to a bid for "responsible prosperity". This would mean "both fighting poverty and changing the unsustainable patterns of consumption which are a reason for poverty in other parts of the world".

It sounds unexceptional, and it is. The targets for halving the numbers of the poor and hungry, and those without water and sanitation, have already been agreed by the world's leaders at a summit to mark the Millennium. The Johannesburg summit is supposed to ensure that they are met.

But there is a good chance that it will fail. The preparatory meeting, in New York last month, got nowhere. The Bali conference (the location was chosen by Indonesia, which is hosting it) is the last chance to put it back on the rails. The meeting in Johannesburg that Mr Prescott attended last week was a small gathering of key actors designed to lay the ground for Bali; he is not planning to go to Indonesia, and will only change his mind if there is a crisis that requires his intervention.

For, little noticed at home, the Deputy Prime Minister has emerged as a key broker. Over the last two years he has met 30 heads of government and almost 100 environment ministers to urge them to attend the summit and make it succeed, building up personal relationships that have enabled him to break major deadlocks in negotiations.

This is part of a concerted effort. Chancellor Gordon Brown has been leading an international drive to cancel Third World debt and to double aid, which has already helped produce totally unexpected increases in assistance from both the EU and President Bush. And Tony Blair has intervened with the President, and other leaders, and given the drive his personal backing.

The stakes are high for, if the summit fails, the issue is likely to fall off the international agenda for another decade or so, while the world becomes more insecure. As John Prescott said before catching his plane: "If we can get the world to deliver against terrorism, surely we can get it to deliver against poverty. If we cannot, then people will get the message."