By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 6 2004 (IPS)

Many of those who participate in the World Social Forum, who tend to be leftist activists, would be surprised to learn that the man who first conceived of the annual global gatherings is a member of the Brazilian business community.

But Oded Grajew is opposed to free trade and all expressions of the liberalisation of trade in goods and services, like free trade agreements between countries or blocs, and even the World Trade Organisation itself.

Trade must be "socially responsible", and thus cannot be "free", and economic relations should be "marked by responsibility" and respect for the environment and the rights of consumers and women, he told a group of correspondents in Rio de Janeiro just before flying to a business meeting in the Netherlands last Friday.

Grajew advocates the inclusion of social and environmental clauses in international trade agreements, a stance that runs counter to the official position taken by Brazil and many developing countries, which fear the use of such standards as new protectionist barriers by the industrialised world.

He argues that if such clauses are correctly applied, they will not be "a factor of protectionism, but of greater social responsibility."

It is possible to create rules that crack down on export companies which violate labour rights or environmental laws without punishing "the country or the sector in question," he said.

The entrepreneur served as a special adviser to Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during most of 2003, promoting social programmes like the government’s "Zero Hunger" plan and dialogue between the Lula administration and the business community.

He left that position to return to his role as head of the Ethos Institute for Business Social Responsibility, a non-governmental organisation he founded in 1998.

The Institute’s 887 corporate members – which include small, medium and large companies – represent 30 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employ more than one million workers. The companies finance the Institute with their contributions, and assume a charter of principles.

Management tools, corporate social responsibility indicators, seminars, courses and other activities form part of the initiatives with which the Institute seeks to create a favourable setting and mechanisms for businesses to behave in a socially responsible manner, said Grajew.

He underlines that the commitment to socially responsible practices is not only a question of ethics, but of pragmatism as well, because it "paves the way for success" in today’s world, where a company’s image is essential in the face of growing requirements by consumers.

The Brazilian business community has undergone enormous changes in recent times, although many businesses continue to wield their economic and political clout in an irresponsible manner, said Grajew.

The process of change is partly due to the perception that being socially responsible can be profitable, he added.

As an illustration of those changes, he mentioned a Brazilian cosmetics company, Natura, which is highly respected for the social and environmental standards it adheres to and upholds in producing and marketing its products. He noted that its shares, recently listed on the Sao Paulo stock exchange, have performed remarkably well.

Grajew, 60, has had a significant impact, both nationally and internationally. In 1987, he and a group of young entrepreneurs founded the National Thinking of the Business Leaders Association (PNBE), which has helped change the mentality of business leaders in Brazil by placing questions like social justice and democracy on their agendas.

When he was the head of a toy-making company, he led the Brazilian Association of Toy Manufacturers (ABRINQ) to agree to defend the rights of children.

In 1990 he created the ABRINQ Foundation, which links 2,500 "child-friendly" companies, benefits millions of children and helps lead the fight against child labour.

After founding the Ethos Institute, he came up with the idea of bringing together civil society in the World Social Forum (WSF), which began as a sort of counterpoint to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual meeting of the world’s economic and political elites in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

The annual WSF, whose first edition was held in January 2001 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, has also given rise to a broad global movement to make "another world possible" – the WSF theme – in local, national, regional, thematic and ethnic social forums.

Grajew, who was born in Tel Aviv and emigrated to Brazil with his family at the age of 12, graduated in electrical engineering, after which he and some friends set up the Grow Jogos and Brinquedos (Grow Games and Toys) company.

As a social activist, he and the Ethos Institute have played a role as unifying agents, helping to bring about alliances, agreements and joint actions among companies, social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The Federation of Brazilian Banks, for instance, is helping to finance a project by 700 NGOs to build one million household water tanks to collect and store rainwater to solve the severe water shortage problem among poor farmers in the arid northeast, Brazil’s poorest region.

This social pioneer-entrepreneur marked up his latest triumph last month, when he got steel mills in the northern states of Maranhao and Pará to sign, along with government, judicial and social entities, a commitment to abolish modern-day slave labour in the industry’s production chain, especially on charcoal-producing ranches in remote rural areas.

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