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JOHANNESBURG, Sunday (AFP)

World leaders were descending on Johannesburg Sunday for the final days of the Earth Summit as weary negotiators fought hard over a campaign to tackle the world's chronic poverty and degraded environment.

More than 100 heads of state and government are due to launch a three-day "general debate" from Monday, gathering 187 nations, on the future of the planet.

But behind the scenes, a draft plan of action that will be laid before the summit as a map for global sustainable development remained bogged down.

Isolated and cast by its critics in the role of planetary plunderer, the United States was sticking to hardline positions, pitching itself against the 15-nation European Union and the G-77 bloc of developing countries.

Activists feared that late-night haggling, unfolding behind closed doors among exhausted officials, could gut the document of anything meaningful, making it a fudger's charter.

Andy Atkins, co-chairman of BOND, an alliance of British environment and development groups, warned the summit could fail, leaving the world's public in shock at the paucity of solutions to a raft of worsening problems.

"I hope to God that we don't have to go down that road, but in the end that may be all we've got," he said.

Australian Senator Bob Brown, a member of the Greens, said: "This would have been a watershed, but it has turned out to be a ditch".

The summit is the follow-up to the first Earth Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, a conference that catapulted the environment onto the world's political agenda.

It takes place against a mountain of evidence that the Earth's six billion people have so polluted the planet and so pillaged its resources that its long-term environmental health is at threat.

Added to that are lofty goals, trumpeted at the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000 and furthered this year at a summit in Monterrey, Mexico, for hauling two billion people out of a life of dire poverty, giving them access to clean water, electricity, primary education and treatment for disease.

The 71-page Plan of Implementation for achieving these aims while also protecting the environment is supposed to be the cornerstone of the Johannesburg meeting, officially named the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).

Not one of the 30,000 words in the draft version of the plan is binding.

But it could have a resounding political impact, because it will determine the environmental agenda for the next 10 years, and its text is likely to be the model for any legally binding treaties that emerge. For that reason, the draft text has become a political war zone, with the United States, the world's biggest economic power and biggest consumer of resources, at ground zero.

More than a dozen sticking points remain, with the European Union supporting proposals to set deadlines and specific commitments on a host of issues, but the United States opposing them.

They include providing sanitation for the poor, the future share of renewable energy in the world's electricity supply, and protecting tropical forests.

The United States and the European Union share common ground on maintaining huge subsidies to their farmers, blamed for destroying the livelihood of hundreds of millions of Third World producers. Neither wants to go beyond a vague promise made in the World Trade Organisation for talks on a potential phase-out of this support.

Those expected to attend the general debate include Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, French President Jacques Chirac, President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia.

Bush will be conspicuous by his absence.

His decision to send his secretary of state, Colin Powell, has earned him withering scorn in the summit's corridors.

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