[PEN-L:29553] the corporate planet redux

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

Who will save the world?

Many of the 60,000 delegates in Johannesburg want big business to
mend its ways. But thousands of lobbyists have other ideas.

Mark Townsend
Sunday August 18, 2002
The Observer

Leko Atarika and his wife and children no longer dare eat the food
of their ancestors. Thousands of oil spills spewing into the swamps
of Nigeria's Ogoni delta have ensured the oysters and crabs are too
poisonous to eat. Foreign oil multinationals have exploited their
homeland for decades, and the mood here has moved from despair to
fury. 'We demand environmental justice,' said Atarika last week.

It is a mantra echoed across the globe. And while the detail and
scale of environmental degradation may vary, the targets of
hostility remain the same. In South Africa communities are demanding
compensation following leaks from an oil refinery operated by Shell
and BP. Here families talk of 'corporate abuse', citing a catalogue
of pollution incidents and blaming health problems on the plant.

Audrey Stoffelf, whose home in South Durban lies in the shadow of
the refinery, says her children's asthma is linked to the huge
plant.'We need answers. Is it right they can get away with this?'

She lives just 300 miles from where the world's biggest ever
conference, the Earth Summit, will begin in a week's time. More than
60,000 delegates from 174 countries will gather in Johannesburg and
attempt to halt the trends which experts believe will, this century,
see mankind exhaust the Earth's capacity to support life across much
of its surface.

Central to the summit's success, and certain to ignite one its
fiercest rows, are calls to tackle the might of multinationals.
These corporate giants will stand accused of unleashing a ferocious
attack on the environment while grabbing from the mouths of the poor
and lining the pockets of the rich.

Their accusers are a diverse network of hundreds of community
groups, furious that their lands have been poisoned, their children
forced to work in sweatshops and their natural resources raided for
export. Can the multinationals resist calls for a legally binding
treaty to adopt minimum human rights and environmental standards?
This will prove pivotal. It could mean that companies such as Shell
would be made to pay for environmental problems they have caused.
Firms could face massive fines and communities would have legal
redress.

'Given the power of business in the modern global economy, it is
impossible to move towards a more sustainable approach without the
involvement of corporations,' said Matt Phillips of environmental
group Friends of the Earth.

Danny Graymore, trade policy officer for Christian Aid, believes the
issue could provide one of the most passionate debates at the Earth
Summit. 'We need to promote real development for the poorest people
and this requires responsible behaviour,' he said.

Much of the debate will be carried out behind closed doors next week
during the build-up to the most critical talks on the environment
for 10 years. The negotiating text for the summit calls for the
promotion of corporate accountability and responsibility yet refers
only to a voluntary system. An estimated 5,000 pro-business
lobbyists led by US interests will chorus the message that the
status quo is adequate. A leaked letter to President George Bush,
signed by 31 groups including Republican party lobbyists, some of
them linked to oil giant Exxon Mobil, warns that such issues could
prove destructive to domestic interests. Bush does not want new
global agreements and has already warned that the summit 'may not
yield a plan' for sustainable development.

This has raised fears among environmentalists that Johannesburg will
yield nothing. They warn that after a ruinous decade following the
last summit in Rio de Janeiro the world has never been in worse
shape.

The optimism of 1992 evaporated long ago as some groundbreaking
agreements were left unratified or ignored. During the past decade,
resource exploitation has continued unabated, the gap between rich
and poor has widened and corporate power has tightened its grip. If
they were national states, 50 giant companies would now appear in
the list of the world's largest 100 economies. The five largest
companies in the world have combined sales greater than the total
incomes of the planet's poorest 46 nations.

British-based mining giant Rio Tinto commands a turnover of £7bn,
for instance, while its executive chairman Sir Robert Wilson, a
guest of the UK delegation to South Africa, earns £1.3m.

No one is arguing that big business is bad by definition, but many
delegates are demanding that the giant companies provide a vehicle
for positive change and use their investment to create
environmentally-sound enterprises that benefit the countries they
operate within.

If no agreement can be reached, the population boom - the planet has
to accommodate almost two billion more mouths by 2025 - will place
further pressures on dwindling natural resources. Already the United
Nations has alluded to a scenario where the planet is dissected
between the haves and have-nots, with massive migration pressures
from the former to latter.

Failure of the negotiations may spell the end of such ambitious
attempts to solve the problems. The current period could well be
remembered as a golden age of naivety. Yet for now it offers a
desperately needed debate on poverty, the environment and the role
of business. Cynics claim the 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide
emissions expected to be released by the Johannesburg gathering is
its one guarantee of making a mark on the planet. Leko Atarika,
Audrey Stoffelf and millions like them can only hope they are wrong.