corporate
campaigners unite!
ricardo navarro, foei
The economic and political power of
transnational corporations (TNCs) has not
dwindled in these first months of the new
millennium. Indeed, the list of companies
and industry lobby groups targeted by FoE
groups and other campaigners grows longer
as the global social and economic crisis
deepens.
For years, the pages of LINK have covered
the unacceptable practices of companies
including Aventis, Boise BP, Cascade,
Coca-Cola, Exxon, McDonalds, Mitsubishi,
Monsanto, Newmont, Occidental, Placer Dome,
Premier, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens,
Statoil, Union Carbide and Western Mining
Corporation. Today, corporate campaigners
around the world continue to refine old
strategies – days of action, boycotts,
shareholder resolutions, letter-writing
campaigns, occupations – and develop new
ones.
The latest in the FoEI bag of tricks, to
be introduced at the Johannesburg World
Summit for Sustainable Development in
September 2002, is a set of binding
regulations for corporations. This
“corporate convention” would secure the
accountability of TNCs to citizens and
communities and would be backed by
effective sanctions and rights to
consultation.
Corporations, organized within the
Business Action for Sustainable Development
lobby group, will strategically present
themselves as greener and cuddlier in
Johannesburg. They will argue that
self-regulation and voluntary initiatives
are the best strategies to today's social
and economic woes. FoEI campaigners
strongly believe otherwise, however, and
will prove their point in Johannesburg.
We hear often of the oil companies in
Nigeria that violate the human and
environmental rights of whole populations,
and of the mining companies in Colombia
that make arrangements with paramilitary
groups in order to secure mineral
resources. As governments are not able or
willing to stop these abuses, it can be
concluded that an international corporate
convention is required. Otherwise, the
ecological debt generated from the North to
the South and between different social
sectors will continue to make our societies
totally unsustainable.
