By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent

This is the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

The computer terminals are permanently occupied. The telephones are as rare as hens' teeth. Even chairs are in vanishingly short supply

So it has no time for anything but environmental problems and poverty, right?

After the first day with heads of government involved, it's anything but.

You need only look at the sparkling performance of those two old warhorses Presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma of Namibia, both veterans of the independence struggle.

'Departure from text'

President Nujoma's turn came first.

Nujoma started the "rhetoric"

Departing from his text, he proclaimed: "The sanctions on Zimbabwe must be lifted immediately, otherwise it will be useless for us to have come here."

Some hours later Mr Mugabe held much of the conference in thrall.

"Blair, keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe," he told the UK prime minister - and the world.

"We have won our independence, and we are prepared to shed our blood in sustenance and maintenance and protection of that independence."

It was a departure from his text - as one hearer put it, Mr Mugabe toned up his speech.

And it earned him several rounds of prolonged applause.

The split

The Irish playwright, Brendan Behan, used to say the first item on the agenda when nationalists met was always how they were going to split.

The emotional polemics set the summit alight

This time the split looked like developing between part (not all) of Africa and the rest of the world.

For a conference dedicated to saving poor people and planet alike, it was an odd departure.

But it did set the summit alight, and made much better copy than the arid expanses of the final plan of action.

In short supply

Mind you, copy, good or bad, seems increasingly academic, as there are now so few places in the media centre where you can be sure of being able to file a story to the news desk.

The computer terminals are permanently occupied. The telephones - never mind that they don't take incoming calls - are as rare as hens' teeth.

Even chairs are in vanishingly short supply.

I've had a more reflective time in the evening rush hour in Oxford Circus underground station in London than you get here.

I haven't yet seen anyone impaled on a camera crew's tripod, but it's probably only a matter of time.

'Classy' NHK

There are a few oases, though.

Tucked away on the fourth floor of a remote building is a prayer room.

I've yet to see anyone in it, for better or worse.

But the place that really lifts the spirits is outside the editing suite of the Japanese TV station NHK.

There are usually several plates of sushi on view. And as a grace note, they have a vase of fresh anemones sitting on the table.

One of my press colleagues was almost in tears when he discovered the bar had run out of coffee (it tastes like British Railways' coffee of the 1950s, incidentally).

I should have told him to apprentice himself to NHK for the day.