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ARTICLE 12 -- SUB-REGIONAL ACTION PROGRAMMES:

During the first reading, many delegations, including Brazil, Australia, Greece (on behalf of the EU), the US, Chile, Mexico and Japan, supported merging this article with Article 13, "Regional action programmes." China, Japan, and the US supported moving the suggested measures for sub-regional action plans to a technical or regional annex. Some Africans did not support the merge as they felt that both regional and sub-regional action programmes are useful. In the subsequent draft, A/CONF.241/WG.I/CRP.3, the Secretariat merged these two articles, but the Africans insisted on keeping these concepts separate and the two articles were restored. The same definitional problems in Article 9 arose in this discussion. Other problems that emerged included: the use of the terms "shared resources" or "transboundary resources" and "affected" or "degraded" ecosystems. Sub-paragraph (d), which mentions alternative sources of energy, remains bracketed, as requested by Saudi Arabia. The US bracketed (f), which refers to the harmonization of trade practices.