Attending this session on What We Have Learnt: Vision for the 21st Century were I K Gujral, former prime minister of India, Ryutaro Hashimoto, former prime minister of Japan, Ola Ullsten, former prime minister of Sweden, Dr Manmohan Singh, former finance minister of India, Robert S McNamara, former president of the World Bank, and Sheila Dikshit, chief minister of Delhi.Voicing his concern, Hashimoto emphasised that the most urgent task for political leaders in the 21st century is to attain sustainable development.

According to him, an economy that pays little attention to environmental protection will not be economical over the long term. ``A real economy is an economy that pays attention to the environment,'' he said. ``While modern civilisation has progressed in the second half of the 20th century, the scale and speed of the destruction of our environment has accelerated at an unprecedented rate. We have yet to establish a viable socioeconomic system to effectively control such environmental havoc,'' he said. ``If humankind fails to preserve our global environment, there is no other place in the whole universe where humankind could continue to exist,'' he added.

Hashimoto warned that food production might drop due to global warming. In India, which produces a little less than 10 per cent of the world's wheat, the production of winter wheat is expected to drop by 55 per cent, according to him. He informed the conference participants that according to the estimates by Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies, the production of wheat and corn in such major producer countries as China and India would drop dramatically by the end of the 21st century unless effective counter-measures were taken.

The nuclear issue was raised both by Hashimoto and McNamara and seconded by the rest of the panelists. McNamara was very emphatic when he declared that the combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons is going to destroy nations, and that we must move to eliminate these weapons.

According to Gujral, The great danger facing us today stems as much from the instruments of mass destruction as it does from the process of slow destruction that is taking place, for instance, in the natural resource base of this planet. He minced no words when he said that climate change is a global problem, and therefore requires global action for finding and implementing solutions. He also pointed out that the overwhelming share of concentration of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere has come from the developed nations. ``It is also a fact that solutions for reducing emissions can best come from the developed nations, which have the financial strength and technological capability to develop solutions for the global community, but there is clearly some reluctance on the part of some developed countries in taking firm action,'' he said. He also pointed out that the Kyoto Protocol has still not been ratified, and there is a clear danger that it may never be ratified.

Ullsten remarked that amongst many in the world community, there is a resistance to even the modest sacrifices required for environmental protection. He brought out the dichotomy in the world today in that it is moving towards growth and development and is yet being left poorer in its resources. ``Although there is more money in the world than ever before, there are fewer resources for developmental efforts for the poor,'' he said.

Manmohan Singh was of the view that mass poverty was not inevitable. ``We have technologies that can avoid that, and yet we are not using those technologies effectively,'' he said. The challenge, according to him, is to use science and technology as a weapon of change for the poorest. ``If sustainable development is to go beyond being a mere buzzword, a lot of serious thinking is necessary. The challenge is to develop a pattern of sustainable global development that raises year after year the living standards of the poor countries of the world. We need a new sense of global ethics. We need a new global order with emphasis on mass moral awakening,'' he said.