For the past three years, corporate polluters have been working to undermine the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), at which delegations from 174 countries will gather in Johannesburg, South Africa, from August 26 to September 4.
Also known as the Earth Summit or Rio+10 (a reference to the previous Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992), the WSSD promises to be an Olympic-scale event with about 65,000 people attending. Unfortunately, the summit is also likely to have all the froth and bubble of the Olympic Games — right down to the handing over of a torch — and as little political substance.
Sustainable development is further away than it was a decade ago. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the body responsible for preparations for the Johannesburg summit, said last year: "Many of the global indicators of sustainable development show little improvement or a continuing decline over the past 10 years — Poverty has grown, fresh water and secure food supplies are not available to all, and the gap between rich and poor has widened."
The task for corporate polluters in the lead up to the WSSD has been to fudge the record of the past decade, to deny their responsibility for environmental and social crises and to avoid outcomes at the WSSD which would put pressure on them to mend their ways. Corporate lobby groups, such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), began preparing for the WSSD in 1999.
In April 2001, the ICC and the WBCSD launched Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD), a lobby group designed solely for the purpose of undermining the WSSD, after which it will be disbanded.
Business Action hosted a strategy meeting in Paris in October 2001. The December 2001 issue of Corporate Europe Observer noted: "The tone of the conference showed that business is feeling the heat from groups campaigning for binding international rules on corporate activities. In defence of 'voluntary action' and 'self-regulation', the BASD is fine-tuning tools developed by corporate lobby groups in recent years. Handpicked, isolated examples of environment and social initiatives by BASD member corporations will be marketed as 'proof' of corporate commitment to sustainable development."
Another tactic is to shift the blame. The WBCSD claims that "business is playing its role" in the pursuit of sustainable development "and will continue to do so", and blames the lack of progress on consumers or on "society" in general.
At the top of the agenda for corporate polluters at the WSSD will be to reassert the primacy of voluntary programs as opposed to "command and control" regulations. This is a difficult public relations exercise, as a growing number of voluntary programs have been shown to be ineffective scams. The UN Research Institute for Social Development concluded in a 2000 report that voluntary environmental initiatives by industry "often result in non-compliance, double standards, inadequate targets or standards or greenwashing".
A variation on the scam of voluntary non-action is the "stakeholder partnership" model. This is voluntary non-action combined with meaningless dialogue between corporate polluters, governments and co-opted environmental groups and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The Corporate Europe Observer argued in a June 2001 paper titled "Rio+10 and the corporate greenwash of globalisation": "The partnership model assumes that lobby groups like the WBCSD and the ICC are genuinely committed to the environment and social justice, but this is basically a misconception. Their 'free-market environmentalism' tends to be limited to technological fixes, which include harmful technologies like nuclear energy and genetic engineering."
Another form of "partnership" being advocated in the lead-up to the WSSD is the "public-private partnership", which refers in particular to private-sector involvement in "sustainable development" programs.
The promotion of public-private partnerships in the preliminary negotiations before the WSSD dovetails with the broader corporate agenda of privatisation of public assets and services. A Third World Network alert issued on July 4 argued: "Privatisation of water, energy and health sectors, and the inevitable imposition of user fees for services, will undermine access of consumers (especially the poor) to essential services. Private sector involvement in the agricultural sector invariably means the promotion of large agribusiness, leading to the displacements of large numbers of small-scale farmers and farming communities, and this will be accompanied by the push (especially by the US) for the promotion of genetically modified food crops, with health and environmental implications."
Thus transnational corporations are not only deflecting attention from their role in environmental destruction and social exploitation, but also plan to profit from the implementation of "sustainable development" projects and coat their privatisation agenda with a green, socially responsible gloss.
Since 1999, corporate-UN collusion has been institutionalised in the form of a "Global Compact", with the International Chamber of Commerce playing a prominent role. This is a strictly monogamous partnership which the ICC and other corporate groups will not allow to be "diluted" by the involvement of NGOs or unions.
The Global Compact is based on non-binding environmental and human rights principles, with no monitoring or enforcement mechanisms. One of the Global Compact's initiatives has been to publicise "case studies" of corporate "contributions" to environmental sustainability (bet you never knew that Daimler-Chrysler uses local coconut fibres in its Brazilian car component factory).
The Global Compact is just one facet of corporate-UN collusion. Cooperation between the ICC and the UN Environment Program is well established and includes regular joint reports and projects such as the Millennium Business Award for Environmental Achievement (previous winners including Canadian logging company Interfor and the Japanese nuclear power company TEPCO). The ICC and UNEP are preparing the World Summit Business Awards for Sustainable Development Partnerships for the Johannesburg summit.
NGOs have organised "greenwash" and "bluewash" awards (<http://www.earthsummit.biz>). Bluewash is a term coined by environmentalists to refer to the UN's contribution to corporate anti-environmentalism and human exploitation. The Alliance for a Corporate Free UN, a growing coalition of NGOs, is campaigning for an end to corporate-UN "partnerships".
Draft documents to be debated at the WSSD leave untouched the central problems of corporate power, profiteering and plunder. Commenting on preliminary WSSD negotiations, Shalmali Guttal argued in the June 6 issue of Focus on the Global South: "The model of export-led and growth-directed development promoted by rich industrialised countries and their even richer corporations, and by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, and regional development banks remains untouched in the Chairman's text. The narrow economic imperatives of profit and wealth concentration that drive this model and have resulted in today's ecological disasters also remain unchallenged. The text does not acknowledge the role of past and present structural adjustment programmes, increasing militarisation, staggering debt burdens and consistently deteriorating terms of trade on the economies, environments and societies of developing countries."
The Rio+10 conference has been labelled "Doha+10 months" by some critics, a reference to the latest round of WTO negotiations, while others have labelled it "Rio minus 10".
Corporations and their political operatives are aiming for a feel-good conference in Johannesburg that will produce a vacuous "sustainable development" manifesto. Of course, they will face resistance. Within the summit, Western delegations will face some opposition from the G-77 bloc of Third World countries. However, that opposition may prove to be too weak and divided to be of great significance. The bigger threat to the sham summit may come from the many thousands of activists outside the conference.
The African National Congress government will mobilise 26,000 police for the protests. "Spontaneous gatherings" have been banned, but protesters will defy restrictions during the summit to raise demands that include opposition to housing evictions and privatisation of essential services. They will also call for land reform and AIDS activists will be seeking antiretroviral medicines. Landless people from the Johannesburg area have been forcibly removed in preparation for the summit.
The impact of corporate globalisation will of course be on the protest agenda — some of the most prominent campaigns are based on demands for a corporate-free UN, a binding code of conduct for transnational corporations and for stronger corporate regulation.
[To follow developments at the WSSD, visit the official web site at <http://www.earthsummit2002.org> and Friends of the Earth International's comprehensive site at <http://www.rio-plus-10.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 21, 2002.
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