ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-UNITED NATIONS: Business, Unions Debate Voluntary Initiatives

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 2 1998 (IPS) - Government, business and non- govermental organisation (NGO) leaders are making new efforts to encourage corporations to adopt environmentally-friendly policies, but not everyone in developing countries is happy with this approach.

More than 60 environment ministers, U.N. officials and business executives met here Wednesday to draw up plans to discuss voluntary initiatives on improving the environment – including a possibile conference this year on ways to build business- government partnerships to address environmental problems.

For business leaders, the meeting was a crucial effort to refurbish their image from being a major part of the environmental problem to becoming part of the solution – without any new regulations.

“The financial, managerial and technical expertise that industry and business has brought to the drive for sustainable development will provide key foundation stones upon which genuine sustainable development will be fashioned,” said Maria Livanos Cattui, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce.

A followup meeting, which has yet to be scheduled, will allow business, governments and NGOs an opportunity to add on to what Cattaui claimed were the “serious achievements” businesses have made adopting voluntary environmental reforms since the 1992 Earth Summit.

“There is a window of opportunity opening for all groups to participate jointly in a process of genuine improvement,” declared Klaus Topfer, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).”Voluntary industry initiatives are an important policy tool for improving industry’s environmental performance beyond regulatory standards.”

Many business leaders who have addressed the current two-week session of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) have argued tat their own long-term interests are actually served best by pursuing greater environmental responsbility.

“We might be spending a little more on pollution controls, but we’re saving on energy costs, we operate more efficiently, the countries we invest in overseas are going to welcome us and we’re not going to be spending huge sums of money 10 years down the road becuase we’ve trashed the place,” argued Ann Pizzorusso, North American director of environmental affairs for the Phillips Corporation.

Phillips, she noted, has begun efforts to reduce energy use by 25 percent and packaging materialds by 15 percent since 1995. “Companies that operate like this are going to be more competitive in the new millenium,” Pizzorusso said.

Yet the push towards voluntary initiatives by businesses has drawn some criticism from developing nations where unions and NGOs contend that corporations may simply want to ease away from any pressure for external monitoring or regulation of their work.

“We have been seeing too often that businesses and corporate representatives are speaking with contradictory voices,” said Kevin Dunion, director of the NGO ‘Friends of the Earth International’.

“While industry representatives are saying positive things about protecting consumers, workers and the environment here at the CSD, industry groups – sometimes including the very same corporations – are pushing to overturn environmental regulations, overrule consumer protection, and undermine labour standards,” he argued.

Jagjit Plahe, a member of the Kenya-based ‘EcoNews Africa’, said that, while some businesses are genuinely trying to become more environmentally sound, governments and NGOS need to participate in a major review of any voluntary environmental commitments they make. Other critics of industry efforts argue not simply for monitoring follow-up to voluntary efforts, but for enshrining workers’ and environmental rights in the core text of trade agreements.

“The real solutions to poverty and environmental degredation are to plan for economic changes which benefit all the people of developing countries, and not just the wealthy,” Jay Mazur, the president of the U.S.-based Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), told the CSD session Wednesday.

“This must mean incorporation of core labour and environmental standards into national laws and development policies,” as well as international agreements, Mazur added. “When any such agreements are made with no effective environmental targets and no enforceable environmental standards or labour rights, they promise only the continued degradation of the environment, both domestically and globally.”

The UNITE president charged corporations of continuing to be indifferent to environmental concerns that could cut into their profits – shown, for example, in the lingering use of toxic benzene solvents in the shoe manufacturing performed for Nike and Adidas by workers in Indonesia and China.

Workers in those countries suffer a severe risk of cancer from the use of benzene, Mazur noted – but workers making shoes in Brazil have forged an agreement to end further use of benzene, he added, because labour rights and union organising are respected more there.

The lesson, noted Gordon Bispham of the Pan-African Movement, is not that voluntary business initiatives should be dismissed.

“Of course we welcome increased corporate investments in developing countries and the proclamations of support for sustainable production,” he said. “But these investments must include standards for fair wages, safe and reasonable working conditions, respect for local communities and the environment.”