Prince Charles, Prince of Wales gives a keynote speech at Earth Summit preliminary in London.

Earth Summit preliminary: Prince Charles speech; Part 4 of 7ENGLAND: London: Claridge's Hotel:INTPrince Charles, Prince of Wales speech SOT- When we do these things, the results are often startling / I am told by Professor David Pearce and his colleagues at University College, London, that Mexico may be losing as much as 15% of its GNP through pollution and resource degradation / even Germany could be losing 4% of its GNP, amounting to many billions of dollars, simply because of pollution / but the hardest thing in political terms, of course, is to persuade people that paying attention to the long-term capital assets of our natural environment is worthwhile, or possible, or even necessary, during a recession or when you are faced with famine and grinding poverty / it takes vision and, above all, courage to speak the truth- Vision and courage are perhaps the two qualities which we would most like to see in evidence at the Rio Conference, but I have to say that it is not, on the whole, entirely surprising that many developing countries seem to be approaching the Conference with cynical, if not jaundiced, eyes / I speak with the inbuilt cultural bias of a resident in a northern developed country, but it seems that there are at least three strands which we need to recognise- The first is that politicians and scientists of the developed world have been preaching 'environmentalism' for over 20 years, yet the world environment has continued to deteriorate overall, especially because of the pollution generated by those same countries / we are primarily responsible for the ozone hole and the greenhouse effect, and developing countries know this, and they expect us to show that we mean what we say by abating our own pollution, and especially that which goes beyond our own locality and becomes an international problem- Secondly, they expect that we will at least remove the barriers in the world economic and trading system that make sustainable developm...