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Corporations have ensured that real regulation is off the agenda (Thursday, Sept. 5, 2002 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- Two pieces here, one by Naomi Klein and the other by George Monbiot.
1. The summit that couldn't save itself:
Corporations have ensured that real regulation is off the agenda
Naomi Klein
When Rio hosted the first earth summit in 1992, there was so much
goodwill surrounding the event that it was nicknamed, without irony, the
Summit to Save the World. This week in Johannesburg, nobody has claimed
that the follow-up World Summit on Sustainable Development could save
the world. The question has been whether the summit could even save
itself.
The sticking point has been what UN bureaucrats call "implementation"
and the rest of us call "doing something". Much of the blame for the
"implementation gap" has been placed at the doorstep of the US. It was
George W Bush who abandoned the only significant environmental
regulations that came out of the Rio conference: the Kyoto protocol on
climate change. It was Bush who decided not to come to Johannesburg,
signalling that the issues being discussed here - from basic sanitation
to clean energy - are low priorities for his administration. And the US
delegation has blocked all proposals that involve either directly
regulating multinational corporations or dedicating significant new
funds to sustainable development.
But the Bush-bashing is too easy: the summit hasn't failed because of
anything that happened in Johannesburg. It has failed because the entire
process was booby-trapped from the start.
When Canadian entrepreneur and diplomat Maurice Strong was appointed to
chair the Rio summit, his vision was of a gathering that brought all the
"stakeholders" to the table - not just governments, but also
environmentalists, indigenous groups and lobby groups, as well as
multinational corporations.
Strong's vision allowed for more participation from civil society than
any previous UN conference, at the same time as it raised unprecedented
amounts of corporate funds for the summit. But the sponsorship had a
price. Corporations came to Rio with clear conditions: they would
embrace ecologically sustainable practices, but only voluntarily,
through non-binding codes and "best practice" partnerships with NGOs and
governments. In other words, when the business sector came to the table
in Rio, direct regulation of business was pushed off.
In Johannesburg, these "partnerships" have passed into self-parody, with
the conference centre chock-a-block with displays for BMW "clean cars"
and billboards for De Beers diamonds announcing "Water is Forever". The
summit's chief sponsor was Eskom, South Africa's soon-to-be-privatised
national energy company. A recent study stated that under Eskom's
restructuring, 40,000 households are losing access to electricity each
month.
This cuts to the heart of the real debate about the summit. The World
Business Council for Sustainable Development, a corporate lobby group
founded in Rio, insists the route to sustainability is the same
trickle-down formula being imposed by the WTO and IMF: poor countries
must make themselves hospitable to foreign investment, usually by
privatising basic services, from water to electricity to healthcare.
But post-Enron, it's hard to believe that companies can be trusted to
keep their own books, let alone save the world. And unlike a decade ago,
the economic model of laissez-faire development is being rejected by
popular movements around the world.
This time, many of the "stakeholders" weren't at the official table, but
out in the streets, or organising counter-summit conferences to plot
very different routes to development: debt cancellation, an end to the
privatisation of water and electricity, reparations for apartheid
abuses, affordable housing, land reform.
These movements are no longer willing simply to talk about their
demands; they are acting on them. In the past two years, South Africa
has experienced a surge in direct action, with groups organising to
resist evictions, claim unproductive land and reconnect cut-off water
and electricity in the townships.
The fact that a world summit on poverty has been unfolding in their
backyard has also created serious obstacles. Sandton, the ultra-rich
suburb where the conference is being held, has been transformed into a
military zone. There have been arrests and police attacks on protest
marches. On Monday, at a pro-Palestinian demonstration staged outside a
speech by Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, soldiers fired
rubber bullets and water cannon, severely injuring several protesters.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development isn't going to save the
world; it merely offers an exaggerated mirror of it. In the gourmet
restaurants of Sandton, delegates have dined out on their concern for
the poor. Outside the gates, poor people have been hidden away,
assaulted and imprisoned for what has become the iconic act of
resistance in an unsustainable world: refusing to disappear.
Wednesday September 4, 2002, The Guardian
[An earlier version of this article appeared in The Nation. Naomi
Klein's latest book, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines
of the Globalisation Debate (HarperCollins) is being published next
month http://www.nologo.org]
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2. Corporate Take-over MeansLittle Hope for the WSSD
The German election could be the second this year to be won or lost on
the environment. In New Zealand, the Labour Party failed to win its
anticipated overall majority, partly because of its determination to
approve the planting of genetically modified crops. The Greens, who did
better than expected, have threatened to bring the government down if it
lets the plantings go ahead. In Germany, Edmund Stoiber seemed certain
of victory, until the floods exposed the fact that his shadow cabinet
contains no environment spokesman. Now that the Germans are
rediscovering their dependency upon the natural world, Stoiber's
anti-environmentalism could be fatal. As the Indian proverb says, if you
drive Nature out of the door with a broom, she will come back through
the window with a pitchfork.
The environment is a long-term issue which has always suffered from the
short-term imperatives of the political cycle. It has been treated, by
governments all over the world, as a problem which can be endlessly
deferred to the next administration. Now the problem is catching up with
the politicians, but most of them have yet to notice. The fourth earth
summit, which begins at the end of this week, looks certain to be a
catastrophe.
It's not just that the summit will fail to resolve the earth's existing
problems. The decisions it makes are likely to become a major cause of
environmental destruction in their own right. The solution to the slow
collapse of the earth's capacity to support human life, both the United
Nations and most of the governments of the rich world have decided, is
more of the problem.
The UN hopes for two kinds of "outcome" from the summit, which it calls
"type I" and "type II". Type I outcomes are the agreements brokered by
governments. These negotiations, like those at all the previous earth
summits, have so far been dominated by the European Union and the United
States. While poorer nations have called for the rich countries to
recognise their ecological debt to the rest of the world, to cough up
the money they promised and failed to deliver ten years ago and to find
ways of holding big business to account, the rich world has insisted
instead that the interests of the poor and the environment take second
place to free trade.
Sections of the world trade agreement have simply been pasted into the
draft negotiating text, ensuring that corporate freedom overrides
environmental protection. The world's water supplies, climate, health
and biodiversity will, from now on, the rich nations insist, be defended
by means of "public private partnerships": the US and EU want to do to
the environment what the British government wants to do to the London
Underground. To defend the world from the destruction brokered by
multinational capital, governments will tie a ribbon round it and hand
it to multinational capital.
But if the "type I outcomes" are likely to harm both the poor and the
environment, the "type II outcomes" could be devastating. The UN has
permitted big business to capture not just the results of the
negotiations, but also the negotiating process itself. The corporations
are moving into the vacuum left by the heads of state, and asserting
their claim to global governance.
In principle, type II outcomes are voluntary agreements negotiated by
governments, businesses and people's organisations. In practice, the
corporations, being better funded and more powerful than the people's
groups, are running the circus. They propose to regulate themselves
through "codes of practice" which in reality amount to little more than
the re-branding of destructive activities as beneficial ones. As the
Corporate Europe Observatory has shown, for example, the original
purpose of the "Responsible Care" programme submitted by the chemical
industry was to prevent the introduction of new health and safety laws
after the Bhopal disaster. This and the other schemes proposed by
business are likely to be listed as official outcomes of the summit.
These agreements, in other words, will reclassify some of the world's
most destructive corporations as the officially-sanctioned saviours of
the environment. They will sow confusion among the people with whom
these corporations engage, and undermine effective regulation. In the
wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the UN is helping companies to
argue that voluntary self-auditing is an effective substitute for
democratic control.
All this makes the presence of corporate executives on the United
Kingdom's official delegation a matter of pressing public interest. In
line with the principles of open government, Tony Blair's office refuses
to reveal just how many businesspeople are being flown to Johannesburg
at public expense to represent us. But two weeks ago we learnt that
while Mr Blair was intending to leave Michael Meacher, the environment
minister, behind, he would be travelling with the directors of Rio
Tinto, Anglo-American and Thames Water. Meacher, thanks to a public
outcry, has been permitted to go to the ball, but nothing would induce
the prime minister to throw the ugly sisters off the plane.
Rio Tinto is the mining company which has attracted more complaints of
environmental destruction and abuse of indigenous people's rights than
any other. Anglo-American has been described as the economic pillar of
South Africa's apartheid regime. Just two days after we discovered that
Thames Water had become an official defender of the global environment,
the head of its parent company, RWE, threatened to cancel the creation
of 4000 jobs unless the European Commission dropped its plans to impose
stricter controls on the production of carbon dioxide.
The governments of the world, in other words, appear to be coming
together in Johannesburg to conspire against the interests of their
people. This perception contributes, paradoxically, to the problem: the
less people feel they can trust their governments, the more political
space is cleared for the corporations to colonise.
But the organisation which is likely to suffer most is the United
Nations. The 4th earth summit -- the biggest-ever meeting of heads of
state -- should enhance the UN's prestige. Instead, it could destroy it.
Already the "global compact" the UN has struck with big corporations,
lending them credibility in return for unenforceable voluntary
commitments, has alienated it from the very people who once sprang to
its defence. Now the United Nations is seen, especially in the poor
world, in the same light as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade
Organisation: as an instrument of power, deployed against the powerless.
Its willingness to help the wreckers of the environment to reposition
themselves as the saviours of the world will reinforce this impression.
Next time the United States seeks to cut the UN budget, the people who
would once have protested will be more inclined to cheer.
The protection of the environment is the definitive test of
statesmanship. While the powerful people who wish to acquire for
themselves the common property of humankind have always to be flattered
and appeased, the long-term survival of humanity is in no politician's
immediate interest; until, that is, the environment bites back. Perhaps
the only hope we have is that Nature, as she has done in Germany, casts
her vote much sooner than the politicians guessed. | |
