BALI, Indonesia - Ministers struggled on Friday to wrap up vital talks aimed at providing a political springboard for a U.N. summit in August that hopes to slash poverty and save the environment.

Officials said final preparatory meetings on the Indonesian resort island of Bali might fail to reach full agreement on a draft plan for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa, putting off some thorny issues for the main event.

With a number of items still unresolved, debate might last into the early evening before concluding, they said.

Dubbed Earth Summit 2, the conference in Johannesburg is being billed as the largest-ever UN gathering. More than 100 heads of state and 60,000 delegates are expected to attend.

Environmentalists taking part in the Bali talks at a pricey hotel complex were scathing of the progress, saying the plan would do little to help three billion people -- half the world's population -- who live on less than $2 a day.

"There is a sense of unreality in this luxury ghetto," said Remi Parmentier, political director of Greenpeace.

"This perhaps explains the mediocrity and lack of ambition in proposals that have been put forward. Millions of people will die if we don't get a good, strong action plan."

Ministers have been meeting since Wednesday.

The summit opens on August 26 and falls a decade after the landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which put environmental issues on the global political agenda.

Officials themselves have struggled to kindle enthusiasm for the Johannesburg meeting amid a seemingly never-ending cycle of summits and with an agenda that covers everything from poverty, water, health and energy to cleaning up the polluted planet.

"I think Bali and Johannesburg (amount to) global indigestion, but I think we'll get there," said Mark Malloch Brown, head of the United Nations Development Program .

"We'll hopefully drink lots of stomach settlers between now and Johannesburg and synthesize and crystallize this, but it's very ambitious," he told Reuters.

Aware of the importance of getting key leaders to Johannesburg, U.N officials have urged 120 ministers holding environment and development posts meeting here to inject political clout into the preparations to ensure Johannesburg avoids Rio's fate -- lofty goals, but few results.

USA AND POOR COUNTRIES FACE OFF

Earlier in the week, UN officials said most of the draft plan had been agreed following 10 days of debate by negotiators, but key differences have proved difficult to resolve.

Some have been between developing nations and the United States over financing pledges being drawn up in the plan.

Poor nations have said they wanted additional aid that was pledged at a summit on financing development in Mexico's Monterrey in March to be linked to Johannesburg, but that the U.S. was seeking detailed conditions.

Washington raised its aid at Monterrey in return for poor nations doing things such as fighting graft and opening markets.

Despite the differences, officials here have said there was too much at stake politically to let Johannesburg fail, arguing world leaders would get on board, even at that last moment.

Nevertheless, some doubted President Bush would show, putting a dent in the summit's credibility.

"I have to tell you it will be a happy surprise if he was there but I certainly am not expecting him to be there," said Malloch Brown.

Some officials have said Bush might not want to get boxed in by criticism of Washington's decision to reject the Kyoto Protocol and recent moves, such as hiking agriculture subsidies.

The US cited cost grounds in rejecting Kyoto, which commits developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Ministers in Bali are also in the process of drawing up an agenda and the outlines of a political declaration to be made by leaders at Johannesburg -- although much of that has been subsumed by debate over the action plan.

Some targets for the plan were agreed at the UN Millennium Summit, which called for halving by 2015 the number of people living on less than $1 a day.

Copyright 2002 Reuters Ltd

###