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* NOTE: The following Summary of Findings is a compilation of paraphrased commentary from this day's panelists and witnesses. It is in no way meant to be read as a verbatim record of the Hearing proceedings.
Morning Session:
Moderated by Kelly Jones and Aaron G. Lehmer.
Hilary French
Thank you. I think it's clear to most people that the forces of globalization unleashed in the last decade are one of the major transformations since the Rio summit. 10 years ago there was no WTO, no WWW, and no anti-globalization. So we face a fundamentally different world, and one of the major questions is what the WSSD will contribute to reshaping the institutions of world governance such that they reflect these changes. In some ways, the architects of the Rio process were ahead of their time. They recognized there was a need for environmental groundrules, but before there was such a thing or term as globalization. So while these [earth] treaties and frameworks are taking shape, the Uruguay round of GATT concluded that led to the creation of the WTO, which is predicated on a totally different vision than the sustainable development vision launched at Rio. Some of the WTO agreements, which have binding rules, directly cancel out environmental rules. So we have global governance with teeth for corporations, and the global governance for the environment isn't nearly that far along. So we need to get this train back on the track, since we need institutions and structures that are very different than those that have been developed over the last decade: much more responsive to environmental and social values, and more open to public participation.
By way of reviewing these necessary steps, let's look at governance in terms of the corporate accountability questions. The structures of international environmental governance aren't developed well enough to set the regulatory context for corporations. There are as many as 500 environmental treaties, and 2/3 of those were signed since the Stockholm conference in 1972. So by the number of treaties, we are doing well. But the problem is that the health of the planet has continued to deteriorate over the same period, so there is a disconnect. The treaties aren't working as well as we need them to work, to address the problems we need them to address. The two major outcomes of Rio were the Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, but despite their existence, global CO2 emissions have increased by 9% over the last ten years even though scientists tell us that we need cuts by 65% to stabilize the atmosphere. And for biodiversity, 13% of plant species, and fully 25% of mammals are currently threatened, according to IUCN estimates.
What can we do? One basic thing is to bring these existing agreements into legal force, e.g. the Kyoto protocol, the biosafety protocol, and the convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. That's an opportunity here at the summit, to use the press attention and peer pressure to get governments to do this. But that's not enough. Governments also need to enforce and implement these agreements, and adequately fund programs like the Global Environmental Facility to help developing countries to implement these treaties. We also need to look at the institutional framework. Trade agreements were given much more force by putting them under the umbrella and enforcement powers of the WTO. One thing that'll be discussed at WSSD until the last minute is the role of the UN and its institutions in trying to create stronger and more effective delivery mechanisms.
It's become a bit of a tradition for there to be an institution created at the end of the day. At Stockholm, the outcome was the UNEP. Then at Rio, it was the CSD based in New York to oversee the implementation. And now many people are asking whether there should be some institutional innovation or development. How do we ensure anything happens when we leave here? This is a complex discussion, but suffice it to say that there's been a long process to look at the UNEP, and the question is partly if we need a new world environmental organization of the same strength as the WTO. Governments aren't ready for that, but they are looking at empowering the environmental ministers, and strengthening UNEP. If you can get the environment ministers to have as much power and global influence as their trade colleagues at the WTO, much would be achieved.
Then people began to say, 'what about sustainable development?', since WSSD is about more than environment. So that's still being debated, the strength and effectiveness of the CSD and the UN social council. This was set up alongside the security council, but obviously is has not the same clout. Underlying all this is how to bring UN into better conversation with the Bretton Woods institutions, IMF, World Bank and GATT, now the WTO.
The key question is whether we can pull of these changes - stay tuned. Not clear whether we can pull off these changes in Jo'burg. There are no implementing mechanisms at the international level; it's not the UN sustainable development Program. The key issues at around environmental governance are WEHAB – water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity.
I want to make a couple of points on corporate accountability. The whole debate over type I and II agreements is controversial. Type I are government agreements, type II business and other stakeholder groups. We shouldn't reject the type II agreements out of hand, it's an interesting development, and it's a reflection of the way the world has changed: actors like NGOs and corporations have become more powerful, and the question is whether we can harness this power for sustainability. Things like the Forest Stewardship Council or the Marine Stewardship Council are steps in the right direction. So what is the role of these type II agreements, and how can they be used for good? In other words, how do we enforce them, monitor, assess, and audit them. More broadly, this is a question of democratic governance at all levels. There has been a lot of discussion on Rio principle 10, freedom of environmental information, access to justice. There is some concern about backtracking on this here at Jo'burg, and governments have to also implement these principles, not just say it. That's an important element of what's happening here, and one of the key challenges to governance. A large part of what's drawn people into the streets is the feeling that the power reflects mainly corporate interests and not public interests. So if you agree you need international institutions, we need to ensure they operate in the public interest. This is often called the democratic deficit, because you don't have parties and representation internationally the way we do at the national level. These issues won't be disappearing soon, and the world will be increasingly more connected and integrated. So we need to ensure the institutions operate in the public interest. Thank you.
Yu-Ling Ku
[Introductory comments] We organized workers and activities to fight against RCA. I come from Taiwan, and the name of my organization is Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries. All the members are workers who sustained occupational injuries or diseases, and their families. But they are not only victims; by becoming organized they have also become activists. I have seen their empowerment and they can change the labor system in Taiwan. Five years ago we organized RCA workers who got occupational cancers from polluted water. This is their story.
When we talk about globalization, this is the global flow of capital and industrial pollution. Workers can't move as freely as capital can. So they sacrifice their health to achieve the so-called economic miracle in Taiwan. Does anybody here ever use RCA products? [some hands go up] They are not that popular in Taiwan, most of the production is exported from four plants built in Taiwan since the 1970s. The government had a policy to welcome the investment from other countries. So we offered young, cheap, and well educated female workers. RCA came and they did not have to pay for any equipment for environmental protection, and they could hire 10,000 female workers. That's why they moved to Taiwan.
In 1992, the system changed and the wages increased but the exchange rate decreased. So RCA shut down the factory in Taiwan and moved the capital to China and Thailand, to make more money. In the meantime, the young women became middle-aged and unemployment and have no retirement income. Instead they have many cancers, lung, liver, breast and so on. In 1994, the government's environmental protection organization proved that there is a serious underground water pollution problem in the RCA factory sites. In 1998, the workers started to get organized. We found that there are more than 1,000 workers who had cancers, and we organized the RCA campaign.
Over 20 years of RCA activity in Taiwan, they released wastewater containing chemicals directly into the ground, so the groundwater was heavily polluted. So when the government proved that this is the case, the workers said it's no wonder that the foreign managers will only drink bottled mineral water and eat in the VIP restaurant in the factory. And we are the foolish workers, we drink the dirty workers, we breathe the dirty air, live in the factory, and we also touch the dirty water directly and become the victims of occupational diseases.
RCA was sold to General Electrics in 1996. GE is a very big international corporation in the US, and then to Townsend in 1998. These two companies deal a lot with the Taiwanese government. For example, GE was building a nuclear power plant. But they so far they have not taken responsibility for the polluted water. And Townsend produces weapons and medical equipment, and sold a navy ship to the Taiwanese government, so the government can't do anything to protect the workers. So we need international solidarity. And we went to the US, to build up relationships with trade unions. In the time of globalization, corporations can challenge laws and governments, but we workers can't do anything like this. That's why we have been working on the campaign for 5 years already. Originally the workers were quite sad. But I saw, as they held a series of collective actions, they have become powerful and can change they laws in Taiwan. Please sign the petition to support our campaign: we demand that the US congress and French parliament hold a public hearing on the harm done by their companies, and that RCA clean the soil and the water, and compensate the sick workers. With the international links we really do something to force them to send a delegate to negotiate with the workers. So far we are still fighting. Thank you.
Aleksey Yablokov
I will speak about Russia and why it is so important. It looks like they will join the US against the Kyoto protocol, which is like Russian Roulette! About 15% of earth's landmass is in Russia. It's also number 1 in nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, radioactive contamination: there are more than 115 nuclear submarines and no industry to decommission them. More than 50% of country is under permafrost, so no normal agriculture is possible. And there is declining life expectancy.
During the transition in the last 10 years Russia lost things like cheap mass medical care, education, public housing, transportation and other social goods. It gained economic and political instability and corruption. We have a strong-hand president, a former security agency officer, young and handsome Vladimir Putin. It looks like he was created from nowhere, by a small group of oligarchs. His government feels very secure, since they have generated budget surpluses for the past couple of years.
But the environmental committee and federal forest service were simply demolished two months after Putin came to power. The ministry of education even removed “ecology” from secondary and primary schools where it was on the list of obligatory courses, and the interior ministry cancelled environmental police program that existed in big cities. The new Russian law on the protection of the environment is weaker than the 1991 version. By order of the president, the majority of environmental NGOs (about 500 active ones out of 1,000 total) have been checked out by the General Prosecutor's Office. This is totally illegal without any information that there is illegal activity.
I call this Russian roulette, the policy of economy first, ecology later. The government has systematically weakened environmental control and monitoring, in a de-ecologization of the governance system. This is what we are up against, and the main NGOs are organizing against this de-ecologization. We organized a conference in 2000, but nothing happened. We then collected 2.3 million signatures for a referendum, where we want to ask if people want an environmental organization and forest organization, and take care of nuclear decommissioning. We only needed 2 million signatures for such a referendum, but the federal electoral committee falsified our signatures and said we had just under 2 Mio, and so we couldn't have the referendum. So we went to court. We failed in the Russian courts, but Greenpeace Russia took it to the Human Rights court in Strassbourg.
Formally we failed, but informally we were successful. The media are heavily biased towards Putin, so we hardly got reported. But Putin has changed his language a bit, and is now speaking favorably about environmentalists. Of course if was only lip service, but it showed us that maybe something can happen because of our pressure. The federal bureaucracy is now inviting us for consultation, and we have representatives in many agencies. It's only lip service, but we are playing this game.
There are two new directions for us: building an environmental human rights movement, and conceptualizing environmental health. I am happy to have seen many similar developments in other countries here at the summit. In the Russian constitution we have enshrined the rights of clean air, water, and so on, access to environmental information, compensation, and public participation. We are collaborating with the human rights NGOs, which have always been very strong in Russia, and we are joining with them. We are also collaborating with the official ombudsman, and published a review of violations of the environmental human rights in Russia, which I edited. Now it's published as a state report, and the first example of such a report on the globe. We are also organizing court cases to defend environmental human rights. And we organized the first international conference on environmental human rights with some partners form the US this year.
We need to foster a new way of thinking - that without environmental health there can be no health of society and people. We are successfully involving many scientists to develop biological indicators, and to research the linkage between quality of environment and health. By way of conclusion, in Russia in the field of environmental governance we have moved back to the 1980s, and it's dangerous because it is the largest country in the world. If de-ecologization proceeds here, Kyoto will be killed and have consequences for many other countries. So we need to continue our struggle for environmental human rights, and strengthen civil society governance.
Anna Giordano
Thank you for your kind invitation. Unfortunately I can't show you the slides about my first and biggest battle when I was 15 years old. There were thousands of poachers shooting migratory birds in the street of Messina. When I first heard about it, I didn't believe it. Then I went up the mountain near where I live, and saw that it was true. I saw dozens of birds of prey being shot, and so my battle started. The law protects these birds, and yet nobody was preventing the poachers. The hardest was convincing police to come and do something. I had many confrontations with the police, and was close to being arrested for my angry reactions to their indifference. After a while they began to understand. At first they said one bird of prey less doesn't matter, it doesn't change anything and there are more important.
First we were a minority, and there were thousands of poachers. They left a dead bird of prey with a message for me in 1989, followed me by car, and reacted very strongly to my intervention. But I have never been touched by them, maybe because I am a woman. I was feeling very frightened, but I realized that if I stop after their intimidation, they would win, so I continued. And many people from Europe and Africa came and helped monitor the migration season. After 10 years they stopped using the concrete bunkers and hides they used for shooting. In the first year, 1984 we counted 3,500 birds migrating and 1,200 were shot [?]; two years ago we counted 35,000 birds of prey passing, and only 2 shot. So these figures, more than anything else, show what we have done.
Of course, Messina is only one case. They shoot everything that flies: storks, swallows, birds of prey - anything. And the policy only monitor the strait of Messina because of us. But many places are without any control, and are only getting worse. But the Italian government is also rolling back environmental protection, and we are losing 20 years of environmental protection.
In Italy, what happens often is that when there is a good environmental law, the government is the first to go against it: it builds illegal infrastructure and so on, and we have to sue them. Before coming to Jo'burg, I have been working in a salt ponds area in Sicily, where lots of birds live and people still produce sea salt. When I arrived, there was no respect for the law.
I like to go back to my mountain to help the volunteers at migration, and to regenerate. So I took a holiday 2 years ago, and when I got there, the local government was planning to site an emergency dump in an area protected by the EU. They used the emergency rule to do it, and I spent 20 days of my holiday trying to stop them. They were ready to ignore 6 laws, but what finally worked was that the EU gives Italy a lot of money, but they have to respect the EU directives. So I said, do what you want, but I will advertise that you are doing this at the EU and I will ask that they stop the money they are giving to the region. That's what did it.
And now the same is happening again, lots of new projects are being planned in Sicily in protected areas. But they do not publish the exact plans, and where the roads are going. So we wrote a letter to the region asking them to respect EU laws. News came a few days ago that one of the signatories of this letter has been threatened in a subtle way. So this is one of the fights we go back to after the summit. Democracy does not mean respect for the environment. – They are changing a lot of laws. And the first not to respect any laws is the government! That's the story of what I have been doing for the last 22 years.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Thank you. I think sharing these stories from around the world is absolutely essential. Most people in the US have not realized what's happening in Russia or Italy, and how serious it is. I would like to report from Scandinavia that there, too, governments are turning away from the environment.
As a general pattern, I see the world in two opposing directions. On the one hand governments and big business are pulling voters and consumers in a disastrous environmental and social direction. So we are seeing a widening gap between rich and poor while the environment is deteriorating. On the other hand, we have an amazing human spirit and a bottom-up movement of ordinary citizens that is growing stronger. It's important we keep our eyes on both sides on the coin, and that governments aren't doing it, so we need to maintain that hope and awareness of what's possible.
But governance is failing is. There is a tendency for young, good-looking, TV-friendly leaders who are charming us into believing they are doing the right thing by us. But when you look at how our tax monies are spent, they are deeply committed to economic growth at any cost. The way growth has been calculated has been changed since the founding fathers of economic theory; Smith believed both labor and capital had to be rooted in local societies. Governments now fundamentally believe that growth has to happen at all costs. This gap between our leaders and the people is partially because they believe that growth benefits the poor. They are presenting environmentalists as anti-poor. So we have many people in leadership positions convinced that they have the moral high ground, which they use to ram through treaties that will lead to more growth, e.g. the international trade and finance treaties.
Global trade patterns are being given preference over local rules and regulations. We are deregulating large financial and trade flows. The Bretton Woods institutions and like-minded structures such as GATT and NAFTA further the interests of multinational corporations. Our leaders see this is as necessary for growth, which in turn benefits voters and consumers. – We have created a situation where basic needs like food and water are being owned and transported across the world at increasing rates by large corporations. The distance between the farm or the source of water we drink and us is growing every day, being exported and imported around the world. The US exports the same amount of basic foodstuffs as it imports, and the same is true in the UK, Kenya, and Mongolia. You can't even find dairy products from Mongolia in Ulan Bator in a country where they live on milk - everything is from Germany!
The fundamental issue of growth and trade is not something environmental NGOs have focused on traditionally. Only in the last 5 years have we seen a focus on the economic underpinnings of the social and environmental crises we are facing. Our leaders have blindly become wedded to trade and growth, resulting in a crisis of governance where corporations have more power than voting citizens.
More and more people are realizing how fundamental this is, and it's an empowering movement. For the first time perhaps, these two movements are linking hands, recognizing that the same policies that cause poverty cause environmental breakdown. We need to understand this economic process that takes power away from people and puts it into an unstable economic system. We are beginning to see a more and more rapidly destabilized situation, which can lead to violence and frictions. We need to be sophisticated and highly literate about the economic underpinnings, and look beyond just local governments and to the economic interests behind it. We need to demand an international solution to the crisis. We need to be pressuring our governments and businesses to sign on to regulatory treaties, instead of deregulatory ones.
We need to expose the bureaucratic regulations that have destroyed small businesses such as farmers – e.g. in Britain, US, and India where small farmers have high suicide rates, strangled by regulations that target large corporations. Those can pay for the inspections, and the tiles in the ceilings, rubber gloves for picking beans in Australia, and other measures – but their small competitors can't. So over-regulation of small farmers accompanies the deregulation that makes the operation of big agribusinesses easier.
Some change is under way, e.g. to do local monitoring of products for local consumption. The only solution to the distancing problem created by the global system is to reduce the distance between farm and table. We need to start shrinking these distances, and bring the economy back home where it is more visible and accountable. Shrinking economic distances while also turning around the international frameworks such that they strengthen human rights and environmental protection.
We need to insist that human rights and the environment are preeminent, and serve as an umbrella for economic activity. The movement is growing, supported by economists, teachers, farmers – what we usually see in the media is a few young people throwing stones. This is a false rendering of this hopeful movement. There is also something we can do at the grassroots, by reconnecting to the living world around us – not just academically, but by learning to plant seeds, and connecting to the wild world rather than rushing around in a competitive sports arenas. We can teach our children right now, and participate in the shift right now.
We need to operate in two tracks at once. This is a global phenomenon. In Denmark they have just this year removed funding for research into renewable energies, in a country that has made significant money from its wind energy technologies. Meanwhile they still fund nuclear energy despite the Danish voters objection to nuclear energy. We need to wake up to what our governments are doing, but at the same time be open to the grassroots possibilities around us, and that give joy and meaning to our lives. So the fundamental shift necessary is to shift away from global economies and towards local ones, and rebuilding communities. Thank you.
Wenling Tu
First of all, thank you to the organizers for giving the voices from
grassroots. On behalf of my colleagues from Taiwan, I thanks WOSH for
invitation and hope that the experience of environmental and social justice
movement in Taiwan can be shared worldwide and thus contribute to the agenda
of world sustainability. It is a precious experience for us to be here since
Taiwan has been excluded from the UN, and this also hampers NGOs' abilities
to work with colleagues around the world.
Governance challenges are shared across countries. I want to follow the
lines of globalization and democratization that have shaped the pattern of
development in the past decade to discuss the environmental governance
challenges in Taiwan. I believe that such challenges not only faced in
Taiwan but also in the other countries which have similar development issues
under the influence of globalization and democratization.
The first challenge is the effectiveness of environmental protection in the
rapid pace of globalization. I want to take the example of high-tech global
expansion. As many of you may know, Taiwan is the lead producer of
semi-conductor products, and has prospered. Short product cycles, intensive
chemical uses are typical of the global high-tech economic forces, and
environmental regulation can't keep up with the pace. It's impossible for
effective governance without developing comprehensive toxics inventory for
further regulating and monitoring. In Taiwan, globalization also changed the
relationships between business sectors and the government. The high-tech
sector has a lot of power negotiating subsidies, and the government supports
them to keep the activity in the country and thus keep competitive advantage
in the region and the world. It is especially a case in Taiwan that
companies use moving to China as a threat, thus mixing in security issues.
Both anti-nuclear movement as well as grassroots actions in high-tech
neighborhood communities reflects such struggles in face of global expansion
and flowing network of technology.
It is understandable that in a young democracy, keeping economic growth is a
means for stabilizing society and winning the next election, at the cost of
the environment. Strong developmental minded society with a process of
democratization has led politicians to focus on short-term economic gains.
In the past few days, as my Taiwanese colleagues show their local struggles
such as anti-Binnan project for conservation of wetland and black-faced
spoonbill as well as anti-dam movement in Meinung, present such struggles in
relation to trade off between short term economic benefit and long term
environmental planning.
In this transition era, public participation is still very limited. Although
it provides a format for public participation in the decision making
processes, a mechanism for real participation is needed that requires easy
access to information and transparency of information, which has not yet
been established.
In this context, the independency of NGOs is often controversial in tackling
the issues of NGO-government partnership--in the form of cooperation or
confrontation. Capacity-building of NGOs, especially in developing
countries, has become an urgent issue for promoting environmental justice,
given the pace o globalization. There are no easy solutions. Environmental
issues are increasingly beyond the control of national governments.
Grassroots actions without global structural consideration and international
cooperation have its limitation. International collaboration is key for
countering the pace and united front of corporate forces in the
international governance arena.
Ricardo Navarro (Keynote)
I'd like to start by saying that Friends of the Earth International just initiated discussions that might lead to framework convention on corporate accountability. We need something that is law, something legally binding. Why? We feel that corporations are taking too much power. We see that many of the important decisions are not decided democratically, but by a handful of corporations. And this is true in many areas.
In regards to water, there are two corporations that in more than 100 countries providing water to over 100 million people. And the decisions affecting these 100 million people are being made by a small group of 10, 15 people, maybe?
Why don't governments accept the Kyoto protocol in their discussions? Why has the US been pushing to close down any talks having to do with climate change? Bush got a letter from a large group of businessmen urging him not to come to Johannesburg, saying that climate change was not a problem. I come from El Salvador where 12,000 people were killed by hurricane Mitch. Sure, many of these catastrophes existed before the industrial revolution, but things are being exacerbated by human activities.
What about oil? Look at Shell in Nigeria. Shell has killed people in Nigeria, and I say “killed” because who do you think finances the Nigerian government? This is happening in many other areas. Hydroelectric dams are built, and in order to carry out the building of a dam recently in Guatemala, hundreds of people had to be displaced. Because many didn't want to leave their homes, over 300 people had to be killed in order to build the dam.
Many times these lands that are “developed” are sacred, but that doesn't stop the building. What would happen if oil development were to take place in a sacred cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia? It would be unthinkable. But it goes to show that corporations do not operate the same in the US and Europe as they do in the Third World. Shell wouldn't think about killing citizens in downtown London, no?
The problem is that many of these countries are much smaller than the corporations themselves. Take Monsanto in my country, El Salvador. They opened a plant, but then left because it was not economical. But they left hundreds of barrels of toxins laying about, and many of them had exploded. When I called the police for help in dealing with the discovered toxins, one of them fainted because he couldn't breathe. In the US, whenever toxics are dumped, you have to call the EPA, and it gets cleaned up in a specific way and someone is held accountable. This doesn't happen in El Salvador.
That is why we need binding agreements, to ensure that the current state of corporate irresponsibility in the Third World is stopped.
Take GMOs. These kinds of things are being pushed onto the Third World. Pharmaceuticals, for example, in Africa, have been suing companies producing generic versions of their HIV drugs for a much smaller percentage of the price charged by corporations.
Mr. Percy Schmeiser had his fields contaminated by pollen from a Monstanto product. And the judge ruled in favor of Monsanto, finding Percy guilty of stealing Monsanto's products. It's totally irrational.
This is why legally binding controls at the international level is a must. If we ever want to live in a sustainable world, democracy is a must. We must be concerned with the distribution of power. But when you have big corporations who make decisions from half way around the world, we must have a framework for keeping corporations accountable.
Nathan Wyeth
I work with the Sierra Club's Youth Coalition in the Washington, D.C. area, so I've almost got too good of a view on what happens in Washington.
We have focused much of our energies on the trade issues related to the WTO and NAFTA. I'd like to run through a few of the issues we've been working on, issues that affect democracy.
Fast Track Legislation: Unfortunately this passed Congress a few months back. It was opposed by a wide coalition of groups including unions, students, farmers, etc. This legislation does two things. First, it sets the agenda for trade goals for however long it's in effect, which in this case for 5 years. Essentially, this bill instructs the US Trade Representative to go out and expand the status quo, the biggest example of which are current efforts at expanding NAFTA regionally – the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).
And Fast Track legislation also concedes power to the Executive branch on the part of Congress. Bush is not negotiating these things, of course, they're way over his head. But he has others working on this. Congress then only has a short period in which to respond either up or down on the entire trade pact, which is often thousands of pages long. There is no modifying the trade pacts. This removes public interest oversight responsibility from Congress, concentrating powers in one person, our president.
A good example of the dangers with this process is exemplified by NAFTA – it was passed under similar Fast Track conditions and was basically rammed down Congress' throat, and it's only now that we're becoming aware of the problems of some of the articles and provisions within NAFTA. We don't want to go through this again.
Not only is Fast Track itself undemocratic, but in the process itself there's a definite lack of representation when the interests and opinions of thousands of people from around the country are defeated by the moneyed interests and influence of big business.
Going back to NAFTA, and my own experience with the impacts of trade policies, I don't feel I'm the best witness to talk on the impacts, given that other people around the world feel the effects much more than I do in the US. But the “investor provisions” in NAFTA's Chapter 11 guarantees that investors who feel that they have been wrongly hindered by the social and environmental policies enacted by democratic governments can be challenged in suits brought by corporations against governments. Corporations are beginning to understand the advantages this chapter gives them. One well-known case has to do with CA's clean water legislation, which has been taken to court by a corporation for allegedly negatively impacting the sales of their product – a gasoline additive that has been found to be leaking into public water systems.
This has had a chilling effect on the social and environmental legislation of many countries.
On Trade Tribunals: Trade interests have created their own legal system, an extremely undemocratic system of tribunals that are independent of public oversight. The tribunals consist of former trade bureaucrats and others who aren't judges, and shouldn't be in a position to make decisions about essential public legislation. Yet they do, and they do it in secret, and they don't accept outside briefs from concerned civil society groups.
So NAFTA has hindered the ability of governments to act in the public interest. And we're seeing the power and extent of the trade regimes' influence in events such as the WSSD. There are clauses throughout the negotiated UN text that state how governments might take action toward sustainable development, but only “in accordance with WTO rules.”
So we've seen the ways in which the free trade agenda has been able to re-regulate governments and the public interest in favor of their own profits.
Joan Russow
Given that you're going to have a press conference, I think you should give the governments of the world some specific demands.
Hidden in the text of Agenda 21, for instance, were references inserted at the insistence of the US that exempted military budgets from consideration. But there was also text stating that military budgets – which stands at almost $900 million – should be redirected toward social justice efforts. I brought this up as an example of a previous commitment made by governments that has yet to be fulfilled. Of a number of government delegates I approached in Sandton (Johannesburg), all except the US were supportive of this.
There was this cartoon, a picture of an enormous man with a huge stomach, and there was a little man next to him, and together they were supposed to represent the North and South. Interpreted today, however, it would read as the US next to the paltry size of the UN.
So the first demand should be to redirect the military budget into human rights, economic security, and the rights to socially equitable, environmentally sound development. We must endorse economic security for people in transition from older jobs into more sustainable jobs.
We've also got to be really firm about what I refer to as the international private investment agreements. I make a distinction between those international public interest documents and the economic interests documents.
We've also got to call for complete dismantling of the WTO because it undermines every international public trust laws. We've got to start using language like “banning, stopping, denying.” I was amazed that Green Peace even called for the labeling of genetically engineered foods – what we need is to stop it completely. No movement toward sustainable development will happen if we're not capable of calling on governments to fulfill their obligations, to ratify what they haven't ratified, and to ensure there is implementation.
I think we have to support Richard Grossman [Project on Corporations, Law, and Democracy]. It's an excellent project: revoking all charters and licenses of all corporations violating human rights, despoiling the environment, contributing to war and instability, etc. There should be immediate revocation of their charters if they're found guilty of such activities. Principle 14 of the Rio document, for instance, prohibits the transfer of harmful substances from the wealthy nations to the least developed countries. Lawrence Summers is of course famous for his statement that sending dirty industries to the less industrialized world makes good economic sense. But the US attempted to oppose this principle in Rio. So in Sandton, I've lobbied governments to make this principle a central principle.
I want to describe a conversation I had with a US delegate. The US and Canada and others are gutting the Precautionary Principle: they're calling for a Precautionary Approach, attempting to co-opt the concept. This delegate didn't even know how many treaties and conventions that the US hasn't even ratified. I think we should have a campaign to inform our delegates of past obligations that haven't been fulfilled.
Then we started to talk about the Precautionary Principle, and this delegate said that the principle hadn't been applied correctly before in the past. And I wholeheartedly agreed, stating that if it had then genetically engineered foods would never have been approved. He then stood away from me and began to raise his voice, pointing at me: “You want all of Africa to starve.” And I said, “No, I want Africa to have access to good food.” I stated that assuredly if our military budgets were redirected even a little, that surely there is enough to divert toward providing good food to those in need. He responded that without our military budgets Canada would still be a British colony.
We need to demand that human rights not be allowed to be bracketed as they currently are in the official WSSD text. Desai stated that the WSSD was going to be the culminating conference of all the major conferences of the past decade. They aren't represented at all in the WSSD.
I'm trying to encourage you to get educated on what past commitments have been made so that we can embarrass governments in the public eye, because the commitments are hidden away in the text. We need to download these huge documents and do a word search to find out what says what in these documents. That's how I found out about the hidden language on the military budgets.
Another thing, we have to ensure that our delegates have read the international treaties and past commitments. I challenge them myself. If they say that they've read Agenda 21 “some time ago,” for instance, I know they haven't read it.
This is how I've used international documents throughout the years. I recently created a collage of what was said each decade and posted it around the Summit: stating, in 1992 governments said this, in 1995 governments said this, etc. I saw Madeliene Albright the other day being asked by the press as to what NGOs were calling for. I stepped in and told them “food not bombs.” But then I took advantage of the presence of the press and asked her what the US was going to do about resolutions such and such which require us to redirect our military budget to social ends. It put her completely on the spot in front of the international press; she had to hand me off to her assistant. And they were embarrassed because they really had no idea what the precedents were in terms of past government commitments.
I've put together a project called the Global Compliance Research Project. Because institutional memory is incredibly short, so if you can come up and tell them where they are starting from, reminding our delegates of past commitments, because this is an effective way to influence the delegates – tell them you're going to have a press conference explaining that the delegates are unwilling to include, say, health issues in a certain part of the official text, that despite the US being a signatory to such and such an agreement our current delegates are moving backwards on past commitments. We need to frighten them with bad press.
Andrew Simmons
I think it is somewhat ironic that we're here discussing the issues of governance and corporate accountability. I think when we look at the whole issue of democratic governance we're talking about participation and the development of processes for involving people, the respect for peoples' rights and responsibilities, and the distribution of power.
Things are being managed by an elite class, which is why I see this discussion as being extremely important. We need to put mechanisms in place to ensure that corporations are responsible.
I remember the war of words during the Cold War, and capitalism won because it promised many things: democracy, more accountability, and prosperity. Yet we've seen the expansion of corporate power, the expansion and development of institutions like the WTO and the IMF, which rather than being directed toward making peoples' lives better throughout the world are been hijacked by corporate interests. And we see the expansion of global poverty, where billions of people live on less than $2/day.
I'd like to share two stories. First I'll share the story of my Island, St. Vincents, that has become a place of monocrop agriculture. The people of St. Vincents felt betrayed and were shocked after having supported and rallied around the US in so many things, and then the US took the EU to court due to the preferential trade agreements maintained by the EU for bananas from the Caribbean. This totally destroyed the local economy of my island.
And now thousands of people in St. Vincents have no jobs, no money, they can't send they're children to school, etc. And this is after I spent years helping these communities, which were once fairly comfortable, I won't use the word “prosperous”, but comfortable – communities I helped to organize in a fairly sustainable manner, and now it's all for naught.
The impact on the young has been huge. They're moving into the forests, clearing the forests, and growing ganja. So if we're talking about good governance, did these corporations ever consider the impacts of their decisions on these people? I don't think so.
I'd like to give you another case. Two years ago I met a young man from Zambia, Freddy. When I spoke to him I found out he was HIV positive; that he was married, and also that he'd lost his fourth child due to the infection passing from mother to child. Because of the economic problems in Zambia, and because he was HIV positive, he was not able to purchase any of the drugs available for stopping the passing of the infection from mother to child. If he were living in a developed country, he would have been able to live a normal life despite his HIV.
Experiences such as these make me extremely angry. What are we going to do about this situation? There are 20 million Freddies in the world. What strikes me is that Freddie was not the type of person who sits back and denounces the fact that he'd been condemned by corporations to misery and death. Freddie was instead able to organize a group of young people living with HIV called the Ambassadors for Positive Living, and they travel all over the world to teach young people how to live positively, even if they don't have access to the medicine. And they're also talking to those who are not HIV positive to have good, safe sexual practices.
So Freddie is an amazing character, and he gives us hope. And I challenge each and every one of us to work 10 times harder to mobilize the resources and influence our decision makers to make a better world, a world where the Freddies of the world have access to medicines.
I want to appeal to the IMF, the World Bank, and to those governments that are encouraging these types of unsustainable practices. And to the transnational corporations, that it's not too late to change things.
The time for change is now, because if we wait until it is too late, the people will fight back, and when they're ready to fight back, they'll hit us where it hurts.
Mykhaylo Magal
People previously spoke of global problems and priorities. I would like to provide you with a case study for building corporate accountability.
What was the problem we were facing? There was low community capacity for democratic governance. We provided assistance to local governments, using a certain methodology for providing leadership training for local leaders.
The local governments of eight regions in the Ukraine have developed their investment programs for implementing programs of sustainable development. Who are the partners? There are multiple stakeholders, from local NGOs and professional associations, to small and medium entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and government officials.
We helped them get access to loans to be able to implement their plans. What resources were used for this? There were three phases: the formulation of project development; formulation of investments needs; and the formulation of the implementation phases. We used resources from local enterprises (40%) and UNDP (60%).
In regards to the monitoring and evaluation processes, transparency in all processes is essential. Local NGOs follow the processes to find the gaps that were not foreseen during the formulation phase. We met with regional representatives to integrate economic, social, and environmental considerations in trans-boundary meetings held between our country and all of our neighbors.
Sustainable development must obviously be concerned with economic and ecological aspects, but it must also integrate a political aspect: because if there is no political will to implement and monitor efforts toward sustainable development, it will be impossible.
The market economic context in Eastern Europe meant we had to focus on creating sustainable jobs. We also had to focus on changing the behavior for dealing with bank loans. Previous patterns of borrowing were based on the assumption that the State would be ultimately responsible for the loans. We had to reeducate our entrepreneurs to understand that they would be responsible for the loans they took out. We had to also focus on better business practices.
Lastly, realistic investment projects were developed because they were need-driven, but they were not merely developed because of self-interested entrepreneurs – they were committed individuals.
Some problems we ran into were the following. There are low human resources among local NGOs. They need more trainings, more attention from international NGOs to increase their own capacity to monitor and formulate projects at the local level. There is also the property problem: after the break up of the USSR, state property became community property, but documents were not always made proving this. So we were not always able to prove that the property belonged to the community. Lastly, it's not enough to have good legislation, but we must develop incentives and have the necessary procedures designed to make governance work.
L. Antonysamy
In June we organized the Peoples Earth Summit in our State in India. People came and shared their stories and problems at the grassroots level.
Most of the ecological threats facing us today are due to transnational corporations (TNCs). The economies of many TNCs are larger than most countries' economies. These are the actors responsible for the ecological catastrophes we are facing today and they are appropriating almost all resources from the have-nots of the world.
I hope that the WSSD will not become a means of further colonization and globalization. Globalization is a vehicle for corporate super-profits regardless of their impacts on local peoples everywhere. In India, for example, we've been fighting Coca Cola in protest of their appropriation and contamination of the ground water, appropriating the livelihood resources of the local farmers and community members and create ecological crises.
This is today's democracy: women and children fighting for their basic rights to land and water. I was shocked at finding out that Coca Cola was a sponsor of the official summit. I've prepared a statement asking the WSSD to return the sponsorship money of Coca Cola.
Take the coastal areas in my country, for example. The lands have been severely affected by the shrimp industries. People are waging struggles against these industries, but even after a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court declaring the industry illegal in many areas, the industry keeps coming. They are destroying the livelihood resources of the area. The laws require one thing, the industries do whatever they want, affecting the health and availability of groundwater. The fruit trees then die since there's less water, further harming livelihoods and income possibilities of the locals.
All of this increases the environmental insecurity of the people, but does not affect the multinational corporations at all. These testimonies clearly show that governments are effectively bringing public resources into the domain of corporate control, and are therefore betraying their own communities. To make democracy meaningful, globalization must be countered by international ecological movements – something I've called “peoplearthization” to include both people and the environment.
It is a value-driven process, focusing on living in harmony with people and the earth, placing the grassroots at the center of the process. It is the responsibility of the NGOs to make sure that national governments become “pro-people.”
This process is challenging and is far from easy, as people have been infected with the evil diseases of egoism, profit-seeking, individualism, and globalization.
We need to form United Peoples Organizations to work in conjunction with the UN process. I call upon the Peoples Earth Summit to take on this concept of peoplearthization.
Robin Round
It's a total delight to be here. I've just returned exhilarated and exhausted from the protest march from Alexandra to Johannesburg. It was very moving to see the diversity of peoples together in this struggle against oppression. It's very inspiring.
Today I'd like to talk about global financial movements and the crisis in financial governance globally. Since last March nearly $7 billion in paper wealth has vanished due to the crisis in corporate accountability. This has affected a multitude of families, mom and pops losing retirement funds, etc. There's been a spectacular succession of financial crises since 1994. This is due to the dominance of “Market Fundamentalism” which is characterized by the belief that markets are the best form of social regulation and that capital and its returns on investment are the only acceptable criteria for determining what is deemed as productivity and wealth.
We realize the extent our democracies are under attack. Financial markets are increasingly the dominant force in the world, dictating international and domestic financial, monetary, and ultimately social policies.
We've seen speculative attacks in Asia, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina over the past few years. We've seen the biggest default on public debt of $140 billion, and the stage is now set for Brazil and Uruguay as the IMF pours loans in to these countries to stop the hemorrhaging. The international trade in money long ago eclipsed the trade in goods, now standing at $1.2 trillion/day. It's hard to imagine how much a trillion dollars actually is. Visually, if you take a million dollars and stack it in the form of $100 bills, it would stand 2 meters tall. If you take a trillion dollars, on the other hand, and stacked it in the form of $100 bills, it would reach 10 times higher than Mt. Everest.
International financial markets are increasingly unstable. There is a lack of a proper institutional framework at the international level for monitoring financial movements. We need to regulate markets for this problem is not going away; the problems are systemic (investors act in irrational ways, as in herd or panic behavior). Speculators benefit from these market swings. And they're here to stay unless we do something about it.
The G-7 has failed to address the supply side of the problem. The manipulation of the markets by big banks has been going on for some time. There have only been token efforts that don't address the root causes of the problems. Financial interests are orchestrating a massive political swindle on us. The rioting, murder, and waves of unemployment of recent financial crises has left millions of people jobless and with increasing insecurity all over the world.
We need to get back to principles: that economic stability is a global public good; that decision makers must be held accountable; that we need to re-regulate global capital in the name of democracy.
How can this be possible? Over the last five years we've seen a growing movement to reassert controls over financial capital. The Tobin tax, or Currency Transaction Tax, is a proposal designed to restore economic sovereignty and financial stability. It hits only the biggest banks and investment houses. Right now speculators bet more each day than the entire world has in bank reserves. One of the unintended affects of the Tobin tax is its capacity to generate funds for basic social services all over the world through a miniscule tax on currency movements.
It's ironic to me that there is no discussion of all this at all in Sandton. The need for funding sustainable solutions to the world's urgent problems should be a major concern. The Global Green Fund was just replenished at a paltry $2 billion. New resources are still needed. There are 14 million people starving in Africa right now; 55 million will die in aids deaths by 2020. The needs are urgent.
This new source of funding is of course dismissed by critics, but is dismissed because it is a threat to the financial community's privilege. There are no technological barriers, don't be fooled. The barriers are all political.
Until citizens' movements got a hold of the idea, it sat on the shelf for about 20 years. And the results from organizing around the Tobin Tax for only a few years have been spectacular. France recently amended its tax laws to allow for the eventual possibility of the Tobin Tax, and Belgium has followed suit. Germany has released studies about the specifics of implementation, and hundreds of economists are rallying around the concept. And every single victory I've mentioned was the result of the efforts of those NGOs and citizens' movements that originally brought the concept to public attention.
All our efforts are interrelated, and it's time to recognize the benefits we could create from such an arrangement. Please visit www.currencytax.org.
Sustainability depends upon resolving inequities in wealth and in environmental instability. Through measures including the Tobin Tax, these financial forces can be harnessed toward global peace, justice, and stability.
Dialogue with the Audience:
Joan Russow: I think there are a lot of unions and mutual funds who have investments in these corporations, and we've got to encourage them to invest more responsibility. I'd love to see someone create a map tracing current corporate irresponsibility for use in lobbying investors to avoid investing in abusive corporations. There has to be a network where civil society in each country knows what the corporations are doing around the world. We also need to eliminate all corporate donations to political candidates, regardless of whether they are during the campaign or afterward. We need to address this issue and call for the prohibition of corporate money in the functioning of our democracies.
Odigha Odigha: Perhaps we could incorporate standards for the global operations of multinational corporations, and get them passed as legally binding. This way we could avoid some of the more serious abuses that take place in the third world.
Joan Russow: Regarding international mandatory standards for corporations, there are already very substantial principles on the books agreed to by the international community, and this could become the basis for more accountable corporate global governance. As an example, I've compiled a document outlining the major the principles agreed to in Rio. The same could be done with regards to corporations.
Miguel Lovera: Do we need corporations? Why put up with them? They'll always have the power and resources to distort democracies. Why not get rid of them completely?
Robin Round: Perhaps the Tobin Tax wouldn't be able to solve all international financial problems, but it could be the start of a commitment to re-regulate the global economy. Until we do so, we don't have a chance to compete with all the corporate money out there, and we won't be able to do so until we reinvigorate our democracies.
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