Three weeks before the U.N.-sponsored Rio + 20 summit conference on sustainable development, member countries that  the United States hoped would produce a five-page summary of goals are instead haggling over a mammoth  grab-bag of demands for new planetary regulation and assertions that  industrialized countries, led by the U.S., should  pay for, among other things, an unprecedented and massively expensive transfer of technology and funds to the developing world.

At one point, the text being debated by hundreds of negotiators climbed to 171 pages  before being cut back by executive fiat to 86 pages-only to start climbing steeply again.

The unwieldy document covers everything from sustainable food strategies to codes of corporate responsibility to technology transfers-on highly favorable terms-to developing countries. Copies of the document are not being made publicly available.