As part of our special coverage of the Johannesburg
Earth Summit, CorpWatch is running three excerpts
from the new book, Earthsummit.biz: The
Corporate Takeover of Sustainable Development
written by CorpWatch staffers Kenny Bruno and Joshua
Karliner and co-published by Food First Books and
CorpWatch. The book will roll off the press in early
August 2002, but won't be in bookstores until late
fall. However, you can order it anytime from
CorpWatch. The excerpt below outlines the decade
leading up to the World Summit on Sustainable
Development.
The world's
governments, facing a deteriorating planet, are
making a last ditch effort to save the Earth. The
industrialized countries of the North and the
developing countries of the South are scrambling to
reach a global deal that will combine environmental
protection and poverty alleviation. But a group of
global corporations are claiming that they have the
answers to the planet's environment and development
woes and suggest redefining "sustainable
development" to focus on "profit, planet and
people." George Bush, President of the United
States, sides with the corporate approach. Is the
year 1992 or 2002? Take your pick.
The 1992
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro represented a high
point of hope for the future of the world's
environment, and the billions of people who live on
this small planet. Gathered amidst Rio's contrasting
splendor and misery, more than one hundred heads of
state agreed on a series of accords in what was then
billed as "the last chance to save the Earth."
The first
Earth Summit was aimed at protecting the planet's
environment and improving life for the most
impoverished of its human inhabitants. The Summit's
members produced agreements on climate and
biodiversity, which established binding frameworks
for tackling some of the world's most serious
ecological threats. In addition, the
several-hundred-page text known as Agenda 21 set
forth a series of guidelines that have served as
tools for local environmental movements to pressure
their governments into taking action on key issues,
from halting forest loss, to preserving the rights
of indigenous people, to managing and preventing
toxic waste.
World
leaders, U.N. diplomats, nongovernmental
organizations and, to some extent, the general
public, emerged from the first Earth Summit in
Brazil with a deepened understanding of the
connections between the twin crises of environment
and development. The output: an action plan
outlining how to solve the problems. Yet ten years
later, little progress had been made, necessitating
a second Earth Summit.
The World
Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in
Johannesburg, South Africa, was to be both a review
of the first Earth Summit and an attempt to build on
the letter and spirit of Rio. Unfortunately, the
governments negotiating Earth Summit II had a steep
hill to climb; they were confronted by the stinging
reality that in the ten years since Rio, the global
ecological balance had deteriorated and world
poverty had deepened. In that time, the so-called
"sustainable development" solution languished on the
margins of an international politics dominated by
anti-environmental forces.
And while a
man named George Bush occupied the White House once
again, the political climate into which WSSD was
born was entirely different than that of the first
Earth Summit a decade before. Framed by war and
terrorism, a significant global recession, a spate
of corporate bankruptcies and the U.S. government
pulling out of international treaties left and
right, the Johannesburg Summit found itself in a
very different context than Rio.
In the
decade between the two Earth Summits, corporate
globalization had also consolidated itself through
the establishment of the World Trade Organization.
Because of this changed political climate, much of
the WSSD negotiating text took a step backward from
Agenda 21, diminishing the substance of the original
Earth Summit agreements. By the time organizers
reached the fourth and final preparatory meeting in
Bali, Indonesia, many activists began to wonder if
the world would be better off without the
Johannesburg meeting.
The Ghost of Rio
In addition
to this difficult political climate, the ghost of
the first Earth Summit haunted Earth Summit II. Much
of the spirit of Rio had been killed in Rio itself,
when the negotiations mangled the idea of
sustainable development almost beyond recognition.
The idea of linking "environment" and "development"
had its conceptual benefits, but, in the end, the
Summit's failure to properly define the terms and
the overwhelming corporate influence on the words'
meaning corrupted the original concept. Sustainable
development was originally defined as meeting the
needs of the present generation without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their
needs. However, in Rio, "needs" were not defined,
leaving over-consumption by the richest corporations
and individuals untouched.
Moreover,
despite the protest of many nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) present at the Rio
negotiations, the Earth Summit documents declared
that free and open markets are necessary
prerequisites for achieving sustainable
development-in these documents, sustainable
development was essentially equated with wealth
creation. With this philosophy at the forefront,
saving the environment and ending poverty were made
compatible-on paper-with corporate globalization. In
reality, globalization has only exacerbated the
world's ecological travails. When confronted with
the obvious contradictions between global markets
and sustainability, negotiators blinked in Rio, and
are poised to blink again in Johannesburg.
The first
Earth Summit also failed to challenge corporate
power in any meaningful way. This despite the fact
that it was becoming increasingly clear that
confronting corporate power and changing corporate
behavior must be at the top of the international
agenda. By 1992 evidence had emerged that found
global corporations at the root of most global
environment and development problems. A U.N. Centre
on Transnational Corporations report documented that
transnational corporations generated more than half
of the greenhouse gasses emitted by the industrial
sectors with the greatest impact on global warming.
Transnational companies also control 80 percent
of the land worldwide cultivated for export
crops and dominated production of almost all
major toxic chemicals.
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Transnational companies also controlled 80 percent
of the land worldwide cultivated for export crops
and dominated production of almost all major toxic
chemicals. At the time, just twenty companies
controlled 90 per cent of pesticide sales. Global
fishery corporations roamed the seas, their
high-tech, large-scale factory fleets making a hefty
contribution to a growing crisis in which 70 percent
of the world's conventional fish stocks were either
fully exploited, severely overtaxed, declining or
recovering.
And while a
number of factors contributed to the rapid
deforestation of both tropical and temperate zones,
timber transnationals played a major role as
commercial timber harvests increased by 50 percent
between 1965 and 1990.
These
companies have always argued that they merely are
serving government and consumer needs. It is true
that governments and consumers are complicit in the
irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels and other
environmentally damaging goods. Yet global
corporations are not mere observers. They are both
producers and consumers of these products. They
choose which technologies and products to develop
and they use their political power to prevent
technological transformation and to protect their
industries economically. They influence and even buy
scientific and public opinion through marketing and
public relations. Notwithstanding the role of the
individual consumer and small businesses, global
corporations are at the very heart of the
unsustainable practices that shape our economies.
Yet
Governments in Rio allowed big business to avoid a
binding legal framework on corporate activities,
opting instead for a voluntary approach to
sustainable development. Some of the world's worst
corporate polluters were given special access to the
Earth Summit process, establishing a trend of
U.N.-corporate collaboration that has only grown
since that time. In Rio, Greenpeace International,
Third World Network and a number of allied
organizations warned that business's heavy influence
on the Summit would lead to the "partial
privatization of the United Nations," and the
"globalization of greenwash." Unfortunately, that
prediction may have been right.
A Pro-Big Business
Role for the U.N.?
The
U.N. has dedicated itself to building
partnerships with global corporations and
advocating corporate self-regulation.
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In the
decade between the two Earth Summits, the United
Nations has not increased its dedication not to
reining in socially, environmentally and
economically destructive and unaccountable corporate
power on the world stage. The U.N. has instead
dedicated itself to building partnerships with
global corporations and advocating corporate
responsibility -- that is self-regulation -- as a
solution. This entanglement between the U.N. and
corporations occurred at a time when the corporate
role in environmental destruction became
increasingly clear and, augmented by globalization,
arguably more profound than it was in 1992.
In 1999,
for instance, major U.S. environmental groups
calculated that just 122 corporations accounted for
80% of all carbon dioxide emissions, and just five
petroleum companies produce oil that contributes
some 10 percent of world carbon emissions. By the
year 2002, the merger of Chevron and Texaco reduced
that number to just four oil companies-three of whom
were U.N. partners.
Nevertheless, the U.N. is still the only global
institution that is a potential counterbalance to
the World Trade Organization and the
corporate-globalization regime. Its vision reflects
the aspirations of many, placing fundamental values
like human rights, labor rights and the environment
before corporate profits. In practice, elements of
the U.N. still help hold corporations accountable.
This is especially true in the case of a series of
international environmental treaties, two of which,
the Climate and Biodiversity Conventions, emerged
from the Rio Earth Summit.
Corporate
Globalization Since Rio
The decade
between the two Earth Summits has been disastrous
for the twin causes of environmentally sustainable
and socially just development. When seen in the
context of world events in the 1990s and the
beginning of this century, the Earth Summit process
is, despite the hype, a mere historical footnote to
the dominant trend of corporate globalization.
The
U.N. is still the only institution that is a
potential counterbalance to the World Trade
Organization and the corporate-globalization
regime.
|
Prior to
the first Earth Summit, there was much hopeful and
idealistic talk about building a post-Cold War world
that fostered ecological sustainability, human
development and democratic governance.
Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War did not usher
in the dawn of the green era for which many in Rio
wished and worked. Rather, it marked the onset of a
globalization process in which transnational
corporations worked closely with the world's most
powerful nations to put in place an international
system of governance that values commercialism,
corporate rights and "free" trade above environment,
human rights, worker rights, human health and
justice.
The
post-Rio decade will go down in history as a time in
which this new form of global governance, based on
the interests of global capitalism, was
institutionalized. This new architecture is embodied
by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
which came into force in 1994, and by the advent of
the World Trade Organization (WTO), established in
1995 out of the Uruguay Round Negotiations of the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
Whereas the Rio agreements were meant to protect
nature, the WTO and NAFTA rules give transnational
corporations favored access to natural resources,
while weakening the ability of governments to
protect these resources or to legislate in favor of
recycling, marine mammal protection and clean air.
Both the
NAFTA and GATT negotiations were well under way
during the Earth Summit negotiations in 1991 and
1992. Those negotiations cast a shadow in Rio, as
U.S. and European governments, responding to a major
lobbying effort by the International Chamber of
Commerce, took great care to ensure that Agenda 21
and other documents were made consistent with these
free trade accords' new rules and that the Earth
Summit documents were rendered toothless. The Earth
Summit and its vision of sustainable and equitable
development were not to become a countervailing
force to the new, extremely powerful, fully
enforceable free trade regimes.
Since then,
the WTO has used its enforcement powers of economic
sanctions and its anti-democratic secret dispute
resolution process to subordinate environment, labor
rights and human rights to the newfound "rights" of
corporations to trade and invest freely around the
world. As a result, the WTO has marginalized the
much weaker environmental agreements forged in Rio
and dissipated the energy the Earth Summit inspired.
The overwhelming momentum of corporate globalization
and the power of the free-trade regimes have also
made it extremely difficult for participants at
Earth Summit II to revive the sense of hope and
optimism present ten years earlier.
To a
significant degree, the macro-political story of the
1990s is summed up by the phrase "Marrakech trumped
Rio." (Marrakech was the site of the meeting that
concluded the Uruguay Round of GATT and established
the WTO.) In other words, the U.N. was sidelined, as
the WTO became the most powerful intergovernmental
institution in the world. The rise of the
one-dollar-one-vote institution over the
one-country-one-vote body mirrored and reinforced a
rise in the power of the U.S. in the post-Cold War
era, a time when U.S. contempt for the U.N. was
still at an all-time high.
The Color of Money:
Global Environmental Politics Since Rio
The
fundamental need to radically change production and
consumption patterns and practices in the North-a
concept central to the Rio Earth Summit
negotiations-has been all but ignored for the past
decade. For instance, instead of reducing
consumption in the United States, whose 4 percent of
the global population gobbles up a whopping 25
percent of the planet's resources, auto corporations
built more sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which pump
ever-greater amounts of global warming gasses into
the atmosphere.
At the same
time, many of these corporations hypocritically
touted themselves as "green citizens" in their
public relations and advertising campaigns.
Environmental good news became fashionable, and
these companies were attempting to bring us the good
news message so ardently wished for by the entire
planet. Unfortunately, believing the good news
simply was not warranted. There are some steps
forward, but at the global level, they are far
outnumbered by steps backward.
Being the
bearer of bad news is an occupational hazard for
environmentalists, and it is a role that is easy for
the public to tire of. Nevertheless, it is a fact
that in the decade between Earth Summits I and II,
environmental destruction in much of the world
accelerated. Forests dwindled, fisheries declined,
and deserts encroached on ever more agricultural
land. Potentially hazardous genetic pollution from
biotech agriculture contaminated food crops, and
clean, fresh water became increasingly scarce. With
the 1990s becoming the warmest decade on record, the
threat of global climate change loomed ever larger
on the horizon, pointing toward a future of
sea-level rises and the devastation of entire
coastal populations, increasingly severe and
frequent storms, environmental refugees, droughts,
floods and disease.
The United
Nations Environment Programme (U.N.EP) confirms that
the "state of the planet is getting worse." The
agency also pins at least some of the responsibility
on business, saying "there is a growing gap between
the efforts of business and industry to reduce their
impact on the environment and the worsening state of
the planet."
The ten
years between the two Earth Summits have also shown
that, despite their eco-rhetoric, for most
corporations in the world green is nothing more than
the color of money. Greenwash-the phenomenon of
socially and environmentally destructive
corporations attempting to preserve and expand their
markets by posing as friends of the environment and
leaders in the struggle to eradicate poverty-has
become standard operating procedure for most
corporations riding on the globalization bandwagon.
Greenwash
is everywhere. It's most visible when comparing the
reality of a corporation's environmental record with
the rhetoric and eco-images in its advertising
campaign, but it's also significant in the realm of
international politics. Many corporations that are
architects of ecologically and socially destructive
globalization accords (like the WTO) claim to be
advocates of sustainable development. They claimed
this first in Earth Summit I and again ten years
later, at Earth Summit II.
Enron and the Earth
Summit
When one
considers the evidence -- that many corporations
which tout their social and environmental
responsibility, continue to expand and develop core
businesses that are at the root of the environmental
problems the Earth Summit processes set out to curb
-- it becomes obvious that something beyond
voluntary measures is necessary.
Likewise,
when one considers that in the ten years since Rio,
transnational corporations have also successfully
resisted most environmental challenges, maintaining
unsustainable practices in the energy, chemicals,
agriculture, extractive, technology and
transportation sectors, it becomes imperative that
strong accountability measures be developed.
Finally,
when one considers the Enron debacle and all its
consequences (as well as subsequent corporate
scandals), it becomes patently obvious that
something is terribly wrong with the self-regulatory
route.
One of the
central lessons of the Enron scandal is that when
left to their own devices, at least some
corporations will gravitate toward irresponsible
behavior. Enron took advantage of the deregulatory
dynamic of globalization to push for a variety of
domestic and international arrangements that suited
its own bottom line in the short term. As a result,
the company ultimately collapsed, affecting millions
of employees, investors and consumers around the
world.
When seen
in the light of the Enron experience, the cutting
edge of corporate environmentalism at the first
Earth Summit-voluntary adherence to principles and
self-regulation-now sounds much more like
mealy-mouthed rhetoric. The Enron experience makes
it clear that the idea of corporations self-policing
is patently absurd-be they Enron, Chevron-Texaco,
Nike, Rio Tinto or Novartis. In light of the Enron
debacle, a major effort to request that hundreds of
companies support nine principles seems a
distraction. The U.N. must be a leading advocate for
fundamental reform of the global economy by building
mechanisms for corporate accountability. The Seattle
Movement.
The
Johannesburg Earth Summit coincided with trends such
as ongoing corporate globalization, environmental
deterioration, deepening poverty and growing U.N.
engagement with the private sector. A key question,
then, is becoming obvious: Can the United Nations
address the root causes of the world's growing
environmental problems, thereby necessarily
confronting the practices of global corporations,
while simultaneously seeking to increase U.N.
cooperation with these very companies?
In many
respects, the worldwide movement challenging
corporate-driven globalization has answered this
question with a resounding "No!" Gathering steam
throughout the 1990s, this broad-based international
social movement emerged forcefully in Seattle, in
1999, when 50,000 people took to the streets to
mostly nonviolent demonstrations at the WTO
ministerial meeting. The Seattle movement was
followed by mass protests in Prague, Washington,
D.C., Quebec, Chiang Mai, Davos, Porto Alegre and
Genoa and elsewhere.
The message
rang clear: "Free trade" and globalization, as
embodied by the WTO, NAFTA, World Bank and IMF
policies and corporate investment practices,
undermine democracy, local economies, ecological
sustainability, human rights and labor rights. The
voice and message of this movement, which has
increasingly been echoed by more mainstream critics
of the global economy, finds itself diametrically
opposed to the corporate-inspired Earth Summit
mantra that open markets are a prerequisite for
sustainable development. Instead, it has begun to
develop an alternative vision-one that is inspired
by the slogan "another world is possible."
Part of
this vision is for the U.N. to alter its approach
toward transnational corporations. Instead of
promoting a voluntary, corporate-responsibility
model, this new movement advocates that the U.N.
become home to a binding legal framework on
corporate behavior. Such a framework would hold
corporations accountable across the globe. In this
way, the U.N. could begin to fulfill its potential
to serve as a counterbalance to corporate
globalization. It could more effectively promote
environmental, labor and human rights. It could help
build true global security.
If the U.N.
is to achieve this, then large political realities
must be overcome, including the reluctance of the
U.N.'s most powerful member states. The challenge,
already great, will become impossible unless the
entanglement between the U.N. and global
corporations is reversed.