Earth Summit feuds fester over rules for business
Date: 30-Aug-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Jodie Ginsberg
Activists say the U.N. gathering, officially the World Summit on Sustainable Development, should be addressing ways to make business fully accountable for social and environmental actions and accuse firms of hijacking the summit to shirk responsibility.
Business counters that it is not anti-legislation but says that rules are best implemented at local level and that formulating any binding agreement would in any case take years.
"There is...clearly a need for the right frameworks...from society," said Bjorn Stigson, president of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and member of business lobby group Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD).
Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of oil giant Shell and BASD head added: "(But) the place to negotiate, with as many teeth as you like, is within countries."
With over five thousand people trying to thrash out a broad accord on international guidelines on poverty and environment, the Earth Summit was hardly the place to resolve something so contentious as corporate accountability, Moody-Stuart argued.
"Do you really want to launch a multi-year programme of argument where small business and small countries are not represented?" he challenged after a presentation from rights groups who warned the audience to beware of partnerships between businesses and communities that had no monitoring frameworks.
NO RULES, NO ANSWER
Activists said voluntary responsibility failed to guarantee a firm's performance on protecting the planet and promoting human rights and that only a global system of rules and regulations would truly hold businesses to account.
"Voluntary codes of conduct have become corporate codes of misconduct," said Michael Dorsey, director of U.S. campaign group the Sierra Club. Not only does voluntarism mean some big companies avoid action altogether, it allows firms to act green without being green, rights groups have said.
Like many groups at the summit, Dorsey is advocating a legally binding framework that would give communities means of redress against renegade companies, set global standards on sustainable development and offer sanctions for violators.
He conceded the summit was not the venue to decide the rules themselves but said it was an opportunity for governments to agree that a rules-based system was necessary.
At present, paragraphs on corporate accountability are among the most hotly contested in a draft text of the planned summit accord. Green group Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) said the European Union was being most intractable on the issue.
"Corporate accountability...is one of the core issues at this summit," it said in a report. "The EU has been one of the main stumbling blocks in achieving progress on this issue."
"FOEI believes that agreement on a negotiation process for global rules for business is a critical test of the success or failure of the Earth Summit."
Rights groups argue that regulation cannot be left to individual countries in a world where some multinationals have more money than many of those attending the summit and have the power to sway states with weak governments.
But business says corrupt firms that do not start doing more to improve the planet eventually will be shunned by consumers, who will provide their own form of regulation.