By Karine Jacquemart and Anuradha Mittal
PARIS/OAKLAND, California, May 11 2015 (IPS)

In our work at Greenpeace and the Oakland Institute around access and control over natural resources, we face constant accusations of being anti-development or “Northern NGOs who care more for the trees”, despite working with communities around the world, from Cameroon, to China, to the Czech Republic.

Karine Jacquemart

This name calling, aimed at discrediting struggles for land, water, and other natural resources in the Third World countries, hides an ugly truth.  The land rush unleashed around the world to own and exploit Earth’s natural bounty is not only fierce and unfair, but increasingly fatal.

Recent reports, including a Global Witness report titled ‘How many more?’ released in April 2015, document the increase in the assassinations of land and environmental activists globally – a shocking average of over two a week in 2014.

As individuals and groups in the frontline of struggles face intimidation, arrests, disappearances, and even death, it is an ethical imperative to support the struggles of the grassroots land defenders against corporations and governments. This is what unites organisations like Greenpeace and the Oakland Institute.

Over the last decade, an estimated 200 million hectares – an area five times bigger than California – has been leased or purchased throughout the world, through completely opaque deals in most cases.

Natural resources in Africa are some of the most sought after, hence the fact that Africa experiences more than 70 percent of the reported land deals.

Anuradha Mittal

Multinational companies with assistance from powerful partners – the World Bank Group and G8 “donor” countries – are moving in, chanting their “development” formula: facilitate foreign investment through large-scale land acquisitions and mega-projects to ensure economic growth which will trickle down to translate into development for all.

Our work reveals a very different and worrying reality on the ground. Local communities and indigenous peoples report lack of consultation; their lands, homes and forests bulldozed and cleared for foreign investors; their livelihoods shattered.

As one villager in the Democratic Republic of the Congo said, “I want to remain a farmer on my land, not a daily worker depending on a foreign company”, or in the words of a Bodi chief in Ethiopia, “I don’t want to leave my land. If they try and force us, there will be war. So I will be here in my village either alive on the land or dead below it.”

They, and countless more, are victims of the theft of natural resources, made invisible and voiceless by those who define what development looks like.“As individuals and groups in the frontline of struggles face intimidation, arrests, disappearances, and even death, it is an ethical imperative to support the struggles of the grassroots land defenders against corporations and governments”

As if destruction of lives and livelihoods were not enough, those who resist are harassed, even face violence, by governments and private companies.

A planned palm oil plantation by the U.S.-based Herakles Farms in Cameroon threatens to evict thousands of people off their land and destroy part of the world’s second largest rain forest.

The company’s former CEO, responding to criticism of the project, said in an open letter: “My goal is to present HF for what it is – a modestly-sized commercial  oil  palm  project  designed  to  provide employment and  social  development and improve  the  level  of  food  security, while incorporating industry best practices.”

What he failed to mention is how a Cameroonian activist, Nasako Besingi, who heads a local NGO, The Struggle to Economize the Future Environment (SEFE), learnt first-hand the consequences of opposing the project. Arrested in 2012 for planning a peaceful demonstration in Mundemba, Nasako and two of his colleagues languished in a jail for several days.

Soon after his release, while touring the area with a French television crew, he was ambushed and assaulted by men he recognised as employees of Herakles Farms. Instead of protection from this violence, Nasako and SEFE face legal battles, including one of the favorite corporate tactics – a defamation lawsuit, intended to intimidate him and the others who oppose.

Privatisation of land and theft of natural resources will be irreversible and will put people, forest, ecosystems and the climate at risk, if it goes unchecked. The time is now to choose a development path that prioritises people and the planet over profits for the rich. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

More than 100 environmental, social and indigenous organisations protested Monday in the Chilean capital to demand that the state regain control over the management of water, which was privatised by the dictatorship in 1981.

More than 6,000 people took part in the peaceful, colourful “great carnival march for the recovery and defence of water” in Santiago, according to the organisers, one of whom was former student leader Camila Vallejo, who plans to run for parliament for the Communist Party.

The demonstrators also delivered a letter to right-wing President Sebastián Piñera, complaining that the water shortages affecting local communities were not only due to persistent drought but also to structural problems in the policies governing the exploitation of natural resources.

“We have discovered that there is water in Chile, but that the wall that separates it from us is called ‘profit’ and was built by the (1981) water code, the constitution, international agreements like the Binational Mining Treaty (with Argentina) and, fundamentally, the imposition of a culture where it is seen as normal for the water that falls from the sky to have owners,” the letter says.

“This wall is drying up our basins, it is devastating the water cycles that have sustained our valleys for centuries, it is sowing death in our territories and it must be torn down now,” it adds.

The mining industry, which uses significant quantities of water, is one of the pillars of the Chilean economy, with copper exports alone accounting for one-third of all government revenue.

“There is a water crisis at the national level,” indigenous leader Rodrigo Villablanca, president of the Diaguita Sierra Huachacan Community in northern Chile and spokesman for the “Hope of Life” Ecological and Cultural Committee, told IPS.

The movement is fighting for the repeal of the water code, adopted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which made water private property by granting the state the right to grant water use rights to companies free of charge and in perpetuity.

The code also allows water use rights to be bought, sold or leased, without taking into consideration local priorities for water use, the organisations complain.

“Our main demand is the repeal of the water code that is denying us the right to have water to live,” Teresa Nahuelpán, an activist with the Movement for the Defence of the Sea in Mehuín, 800 km south of Santiago, told IPS.

The code “favours profits and the wealthy,” she argued.

The organisations are also demanding the repeal of the bilateral mining treaty signed by Chile and Argentina in 1997 which, they say, hands foreign mining corporations all of the water and energy they need for their operations along the border between the two countries.

The treaty states that the public institutions of the two countries will act in a coordinated manner with a view to facilitating mining investment and the development of the industry. It goes on to say that towards that end, public authorities will permit the use of “all kinds of natural resources, inputs and infrastructure”.

Villablanca said “the binational mining treaty hands over 4,000 kilometres of (Andes) mountains to transnational corporations.”

The community leader said the agreement “allows the extraction of natural resources and the use of water to be granted practically free of charge to companies.

“In Latin America, the biggest concentrations of freshwater are in the Andes mountains,” home to 80 percent of Chile’s indigenous communities, who “depend on these sources of water for survival,” he said.

Furthermore, “these mining and water use concessions (to private interests) are inheritable; they are forcing the highlands communities to retreat. Indigenous people have been moving out and small-scale mining and livestock-raising, which the communities depended on for subsistence, have been hurt,” Villablanca added.

“The aim of the march was to have an impact on public opinion, in Chile as well as at an international level,” he said.

Nahuelpán said “the march is a wakeup call for people, and a demand for water that allows us to continue living, that gives us life.

“Logging companies in the south have also caused a great deal of damage” to Mapuche communities, she added. “The territories are drying up; there are many communities that have no water, and that are getting water from tanker trucks.”

The Mapuche are Chile’s largest indigenous group, numbering about one million in a country of nearly 17 million people. They represent 87 percent of the native population, and live mainly in the south of the country, where Mapuche communities frequently clash with logging companies over land and water.

The latest setback in the organisations’ struggles was an early April Supreme Court verdict ruling that it is not illegal for a mining company to not pay for extracting groundwater on land it was granted under concession because it is merely “exploring” for minerals in the water, rather than “exploiting” the water.

Environmentalists warn that the ruling could serve as a legal precedent for mining corporations to use water without any controls, even until a water source has been exhausted.

The ruling was in favour of the Sociedad Legal Minera NX Uno de Peine company, which the Dirección General de Aguas, Chile’s water authority, had denounced for using groundwater without a permit.

But the Supreme Court ruling stated that the groundwater pumping operation in question was authorised by the exploration concession and did not require a permit from the water authority, as stated in article 58 of the water code.

“We’re talking about water that was in the basins, which enables Chile’s valleys to survive,” said Villablanca. “In a word, they are leaving all of Chile without water.”

Civil society actors and the some corporate groups here are reacting with excitement to indications that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates the country’s stock exchanges, is likely to take up discussion over new rules that would mandate the public disclosure of all political spending by U.S.-listed public corporations.

With the issue now on the SEC’s agenda, a formal announcement is slated for April, with a period of public input to follow. On Tuesday, a broad coalition of academics and activists urged the commission to move swiftly.

The move comes in the aftermath of a contentious U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the possibility for nearly unlimited anonymous corporate spending on political causes. Many warn that the decision led to the most expensive election cycle in history, concluding in November after political spending amounted to some six billion dollars nationwide, much of it untraceable.

“We’ve seen a 400 percent increase since 2008 in political spending by outside organisations,” Rob McCord, treasurer for the state of Pennsylvania, said Tuesday in a conference call to discuss the new SEC moves.

“The creepy thing is that more than 60 percent of this money was from super PACs” – political action committees allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money – “funded by just over 100 individuals.”

The Supreme Court, in a 2010 decision known as Citizens United, ruled that corporations’ right to engage in political spending – seen as an extension of free speech – cannot be limited. Yet the justices were also adamant in their support for transparency of that spending.

While the case enraged activists and scholars, particularly on the political left, the recent election saw such an avalanche of spending – particularly noticeable in certain state-level campaigns – that many across the country are today feeling that something significant has changed.

“I hear from my constituents – people are really outraged with the effect that big money is having in politics, and the impact that this is making on how we govern and run elections,” John Sarbanes, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, told journalists Tuesday.

“There’s an absolute chorus out there among ordinary Americans who are fed up that their government and campaigns have been taken over by special interests, and they expect the Congress to do something.”

According to a survey taken in October, at the height of the recent presidential election, an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens – 77 percent – said they would favour a requirement requiring public disclosure of all corporate spending on political activities; 45 percent were “strongly in favour” of such a measure.

Investor demand

While several pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress that would require such disclosure, Sarbanes notes that there is much that can be done at the regulatory level, as well.

The SEC’s actions may have been motivated by a growing backlash by corporate investors. Since Citizens United, many shareholders have become increasingly worried about being cut off from any details about their company’s political spending – specifics on amounts given, to whom or, of particular importance, the strategies behind such policies.

“Political spending disclosure is necessary for the smooth functioning of markets, and fits comfortably within the securities laws and the SEC’s framework,” Alya Z. Kayal, director of policy and programmes at the U.S. Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, a Washington association, told IPS.

“It is an important tool that helps shareholders, investors, management and directors deal with significant risks that can threaten companies and shareholder value.”

The forum has highlighted disclosure as a central priority for its work this year. As highlighted in a trends report released in November, Kayal notes, the forum’s research “found that a leading concern for shareholders, especially since the Citizens United decision, is corporate political spending and lobbying; investors filed more than 100 resolutions annually in 2011 and 2012 seeking better review and disclosure by portfolio company management of these activities.”

A petition to the SEC requesting rules on this issue was filed in 2011 by a bipartisan committee of law professors. Since that time, the SEC has received some 323,000 public comments in support of the petition – the most significant public response the commission has ever experienced, garnering around 150,000 more comments than the next largest response.

“If you look at the responses to the petition, investors have been clamouring for this information for some time,” Robert Jackson, a professor at the Columbia Law School and one of the lead filers of the petition to the SEC, said Tuesday. “Shareholder proposals for spending on politics have become the most requested type at large public companies in the U.S.”

Unchecked authority

While the SEC’s next moves are not yet certain, supporters say that several signs suggest that it is very likely that the body will indeed take up the rulemaking discussion on corporate political spending. In anticipation of such actions, several major actors have begun to build resistance.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, has already stated its opposition to any new disclosure rule. According to Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, the Chamber was the single largest outside spender during the 2010 election, and distributed another 36 million dollars during the 2012 campaigns, while refusing to name donors.

In a Jan. 4 letter to the SEC obtained by IPS, the Chamber and two dozen other industry groups warned against the petition’s overly broad scope, the SEC’s own lack of expertise in regulating political activity, and the potential violation of corporations’ freedom of speech.

The letter also suggests that “there is no evidence whatever that shareholders generally are clamoring for this information” and that, anyway, a rulemaking initiative “cannot be justified on the theory that political activity harms shareholder value – the evidence plainly shows that corporate political activity enhances shareholder value.”

Yet Adam Kanzer, with Domini Social Investments, counters that there is “Lots of strong institutional support for this rule … (from those) looking to invest in companies with superior products, not with superior access to politicians.”

He continues, “Currently, CEOs across the country have unchecked authority to spend other people’s money on political campaigns. Companies repeatedly say their political spending is in our best interests, but we’d like to assess that for ourselves.”

Tobacco corporations threaten public health with lawsuits against anti-tobacco legislation. Credit: Fried Dough/ CC by 2.0

By Isabelle de Grave
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 2 2012 (IPS)

Lawsuits from major tobacco corporations challenging anti-tobacco policies all over the world underscore the ever greater need for a global crackdown on tobacco use, for the sake of both public health and global development goals.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) highlighted this situation when it chose “industry interference” as the centrepiece of its anti-tobacco campaign this year for World No Tobacco Day, observed annually on May 31.

The WHO has taken a “bold stance” in a bid to stop the tobacco industry’s attempts to undercut steps to improve public health, John Stewart, senior international organiser of Corporate Accountability International (CAI), told IPS.

“Tobacco and poverty create a vicious circle, since it is the poor who smoke most and bear the brunt of the economic and disease burden of tobacco use,” said United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon in his address on World Tobacco Day.

Tobacco kills nearly 6 million people each year. It will kill up to 8 million people per year by 2030, of which more than 80 percent will live in low- and middle-income countries, according to the WHO.

Many countries have taken steps towards kicking a lethal global habit, and the Global Tobacco Treaty (formally known as the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, or FCTC) is a crucial tool in the struggle. If fully implemented, it could save more than 200 million lives, Stewart told IPS.

Ahead of global tobacco treaty meetings to be held in Seoul in November, groundbreaking policies in Australia and Uruguay have been lauded as positive steps towards reducing tobacco consumption.

Health warnings must now cover 80 percent of cigarette packages in Uruguay and each brand is permitted only one design per package. Australia has gone further still, implementing a policy of plain packaging in an attempt to de-glamorise the appeal of smoking.

In response, the tobacco firm Philip Morris International has declared the policies “excessive” and filed a lawsuit at a World Bank affiliate, seeking unspecified damages for lost profits.

“While governments and the international health community try to implement effective measures to contain tobacco use and protect the health of people, their efforts are being aggressively opposed by an industry whose products kill people,” said Ban, noting big tobacco’s aggressive attempts to derail public health initiatives.

The prospect of lengthy and expensive lawsuits threatens to become an effective deterrent to anti-tobacco policies of the type pioneered by Australia and Uruguay.

“Big Tobacco’s bullying is the single greatest threat to implementation of the Global Trade Treaty,” Stewart said.

“Marlboro Man” Awards

The Marlboro Man awards, part of CAI’s Challenging Big Tobacco campaign, are a mock celebration of governments’ failures to stand up to the tobacco industry

By buoying big tobacco’s litigation campaign, some countries, including the Netherlands, Indonesia, Honduras and Ukraine, qualify for nomination in this year’s awards.

Ukraine complained at the World Trade Organisation about Australia’s ban on branding cigarette packets, saying it violated international intellectual property laws.

Yet Ukraine doesn’t have any trade with Australia, Stewart pointed out. “It seems a pretty obvious case of the industry somehow influencing the government of the Ukraine to do their dirty work for them.”

Given the increasingly aggressive and manipulative tactics taken by big tobacco, public health policymakers and anti-tobacco campaigners have little trust in the industry.

“Public health initiatives should be focused on challenging this deadly industry,” Stewart told IPS.

“The tobacco industry presents itself as a stakeholder in public health policy. We are calling on governments to keep big tobacco out of the room when public health policy decisions are being made” he said.

But others believe in the possibilities of reining in corporate giants and challenging them face to face.

“The industry can’t be painted with one brush stroke,” said Scott Ballin, a health policy consultant and former vice president for public policy and legislative counsel at the American Heart Association.

“There is a need to think from the standpoint of what the companies could do if they wanted to – for instance, stopping the production of tobacco tainted with other products, cracking down on smuggling and raising standards,” Ballin told IPS.

From this perspective, dialogue can’t be ruled out. Ballin suggested “challeng(ing) these companies and forc(ing) them to develop the products that technology says can be developed. This will move people away from cigarettes to using low-risk products,” he said.

Targeting youth

According to CAI’s 2012 report “Cutting through the Smoke”, tobacco giants have and continue to operate a shamelessly exploitative marketing strategy in the developing world.

Faced with dropping sales in the U.S., UK and European markets, big tobacco has turned to consumers in the developing world to bolster cigarette sales.

For the past seven years British American Tobacco Nigeria (BATN) has been utilising underground parties held at secret locations in Lagos to attract hip Nigerian party goers with the allure of free fun.

At a conference organised for World No Tobacco Day, Gigi Kellett, CAI’s Challenging Big Tobacco campaign director, described the scene.

“Picture a dance floor throbbing to the beat of music, young women in sequined mini-skirts adding sparkle to the crowded throng, young men in fedoras making their way to an all-you-can-smoke-and-drink buffet, courtesy of the nation’s largest tobacco corporation: British American Tobacco Nigeria,” Kellett told reporters and policy makers.

Environmental Rights Action Nigeria, a Nigerian advocacy group dedicated to the defence of the human ecosystem in terms of human rights, has worked tirelessly to bring the Global Tobacco Treaty into force in Nigeria.

But big tobacco skirts regulation with these smoking parties, advertised online or by word of mouth, Kellett added.

These corporations’ exploitation of alternative regulatory contexts in emerging countries like Nigeria worsens the already tarnished image of the industry. It exemplifies one of several points of conflict between big tobacco and the Global Tobacco Trade Treaty.

Ballin suggested that “the best way to find a path forward is to sit down with the stakeholders”. But as tobacco companies’ underhanded marketing strategies transgress the boundaries of international law, anger and suspicion overtake the landscape, transforming it into a battlefield.