New Conquest of Corporate Globalization?

Transnational corporations are seen to dominate and dictate the outcome of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. 

By Jennifer del Rosario-Malonzo, IBON Features
Re-posted by Bulatlat.com 

A decade after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), popularly known as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992, the global environment continues to rapidly deteriorate while majority of the world’s population remain poor and hungry. The much-extolled spirit of Rio has dissipated as the promises and hopes of the paradigm called sustainable development failed to materialize.

This month, the world revisits the accomplishments and failings of the Earth Summit 10 years after. Rio+10 - or the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) - is being held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At the WSSD Preparatory Committee meeting held in Bali, Indonesia last May, environment groups were warning that Rio+10 is in danger of collapse because governments continue to place greater importance on corporate globalization over the well-being of people and the earth. Undoubtedly, business and financial institutions are profoundly involved in and dominating the WSSD processes.

Earth Summit in retrospectThe Earth Summit held 10 years ago supposedly provided a unique opportunity to establish the basis for the major shift required to put this planet on the path toward a more secure and sustainable future.

Its main achievement was compelling diplomats and leaders of nations to recognize both the critical state of the global environment and how this was intrinsically connected to the present economic and social order, and that the solution involves addressing the environment and development crises simultaneously.

Thus the concept of sustainable development was promoted, carrying two principal components: environmental protection and providing the basic needs of present and future generations.

The major products of UNCED are the Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, a set of principles supporting the sustainable management of forests, and legally binding conventions on climate change and biological diversity.

Agenda 21 and the Rio DeclarationAgenda 21 is a complex document that took two years to develop. It aims to set global goals on manifold issues on environment and development, define the direction of actions, identify priorities and assess progress.

The United Nations considers the document as a comprehensive and far-reaching program for sustainable development, and embodies the centerpiece of international cooperation and coordination activities within the UN system.

The Rio summit was praised for producing the specific agreements and initiatives on climate change, bio safety and water. Grassroots organizations, however, counter that almost all the agreements formed or under negotiation display neo-liberal and corporate bias. In fact, the Earth Summit provided corporations the opportunity to privatize and commercialize nature, with air, water and genetic building blocks of life transformed into commodities.

For example, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change is filled with market-based solutions that undermine its very integrity. Meanwhile, biotechnology is being hailed as the solution to worldwide hunger and is being promoted by UN agencies although there is growing concern over safety and the lack of stringent testing, labeling and liability requirements. As for water, corporations are steering the debate over access to this resource as a basic human right toward considering it as an economic good. This advances TNC interest in the privatization of water.

The Earth Summit may have placed the environment on the global consciousness and established the relationship between economic and ecological crises. Despite these achievements, however, UNCED had many basic weaknesses and failures.

Topping the shortcomings is that despite the professed consensus, governments of developed countries refused to commit to vital change in the world economic order. As a result, UNCED failed to highlight this in Agenda 21. In the partnership between developed and underdeveloped countries, the pledge for new and additional financial resources and the pledge to implement technology transfer became poor replacements for reforms in international economic relations.

Despite the promise of technology transfer, governments of developed countries emphasized that they will not compromise the intellectual property rights of their corporations. Also, with the failure to include TNC regulation, Agenda 21 provisions were rendered toothless and largely unimplemented.

Larger picture: corporate globalizationBeyond the structural defects of UNCED, the fundamental reason for the failure of sustainable development was the conflicting paradigm of globalization. Supported and propagated by developed countries and their TNCs, globalization marginalized sustainable development while at the same time using it to cover its destructive force.

The global campaign for neo-liberal free market demands the reduction/removal of government measures that were put in place to protect national economies and the environment. The market reigns supreme, with big business, particularly TNCs that dominate and control industries, granted various rights and privileges. State intervention, even in social services, has been limited.

The negative impact of market forces is glossed over, and human development and equity issues such as poverty and access to basic needs are sidetracked. Similarly, environmental regulations are emasculated by capitalist interests, allowing market forces to be free (i.e., harmful practices of TNCs are unhampered) on the premise that this would encourage growth.

Neo-liberal globalization is used to sustain global corporate monopoly. In the face of global crisis and recession in industrial nations, opening up and creating markets to dump surplus products and capital to generate profits become urgent for giant corporations and their home countries. Thus, under present political and economic structures, the ideals of Rio are extremely difficult to achieve.

It is unfortunate that rising environmental awareness has been used to further the corporate agenda. In Rio (and perhaps in Johannesburg, too), business and financial institutions were able to exploit the slogan of sustainable development to serve their purpose.

WTO and Rio+10

One of the institutional tools of corporate globalization is the World Trade Organization (WTO). It started out as a trade agreement after World War II (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) but was expanded through various negotiations. Today, the WTO is the largest trade organization and its scope continues to extend to matters beyond trade, including intellectual property, services, investments and the environment.

The WTO regime aims to remove both tariff and non-tariff measures (NTMs). NTMs, which are any government measure, policy or practice that distorts trade, include those designed to promote sustainability and safety such as harvesting restrictions, bans on destructive equipment, ecolabels and embargoes on species suspected of disease or illness.

In fact, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) has conducted a survey of NTMs in the Pacific Rim markets, with the objective of bringing it to the WTO as a framework for negotiations on market access. The report, which still has to be made public, could be a laundry list of measures being targeted for elimination through WTO negotiations. This comprises the final push to remove all government control on natural resources like fisheries and forestry, where policies for conservation or community development are made subservient to trade expansion.

In the WTO Fourth Ministerial Conference held in Doha, Qatar in November 2001, trade ministers from 140 nations gave the WTO new mandates that could intensify ecological destruction. The Doha Conference mandated environmentally-harmful actions such as burning of fossil fuels, logging, large-scale fishing, use of toxic chemicals, and the commercialization of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Public opposition worldwide has been mounting but the WTO continues to accrue power, increasing its influence and placing the fate of peoples and nature in its hands. Although the WTO never fails to give lip service on reducing poverty and pursuing sustainable development, the Doha Ministerial Declaration gave the WTO the mandate to prohibit governments from regulating TNC operations that can negatively affect the environment. It declared the trade body as the arbiter of the natural resource crisis and the venue to discuss conflicts in international agreements on trade and the environment.

The Doha Declaration has clearly challenged the WSSD preparations and usurped the role of the United Nations on the matter. Ironically, the UN Secretary-General’s WSSD preparatory report proclaimed the Doha program a success. Corporate influence in the international body is evident in the Rio+10 preparatory process, which displays intense neoliberal bias.

Undermining MEAs

Another significant implication of the Doha Declaration is that the corporate agenda on the environment is given legitimacy under the aegis of so-called WTO principles. A concrete manifestation of this is the subordination of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) to trade agreements.

The most direct attack of the WTO to sustainable development and the WSSD is the mandate to unilaterally decide on how to deal with MEAs that have trade sanctions as enforcement mechanism. (See below)

Through the Declaration, powerful countries have given the WTO the right to arbitrarily determine whether the measures imposed by the MEAs constitute so-called barriers to trade. Thus, the MEAs are made subordinate to the rights of corporations and investors enshrined in the WTO.

In the context of WTO-sponsored negotiations to "clarify" the relationship between the MEAs and WTO agreements, the Doha Declaration stipulates that: 1) trade, not environment, ministers shall lead the negotiations; 2) MEA secretariats are given "observer" status only; and 3) outcomes will not be prejudged .

Progressive groups observed that in the Bali preparatory meeting, due to strong pressure from industry and some governments (particularly the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), Rio+10 seems to have completely surrendered to the WTO and saw its main responsibility as ensuring the implementation of the Doha agenda. The so-called Chairman’s Text, or the Draft Plan of Action, still promotes the neo-liberal export-led and growth-directed development model.Johannesburg: another corporate victory?

Corporations were victorious in the 1992 Earth Summit. At Rio, the corporate lobby successfully contrived certain outcomes. The summit may have brought to fore the environment and development crises, but it was also the first time that business was able to position itself strategically in the debate.

First, TNCs and their lobby groups were able to oppose many demands that ran counter to business interests. The most significant was how binding regulations on TNCs were dismissed and replaced with their so-called voluntary measures.

Second, TNC lobby groups, particularly the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, gained international influence over the environmental and social debate. Before Rio, their efforts were primarily directed toward national governments. Because of this development, TNCs have been given a cloak of legitimacy, making them stakeholders instead of culprits, glossing over their dirty practices with greenwash. As stakeholders, their opinions and interests were reflected in all major environment and development agreements.

Other corporate lobby groups such as the Business Action for Sustainable Development, the International Chamber of Commerce and the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) Initiative are also working to focus the WSSD output on technocratic and voluntary solutions. Once again, they are redefining corporate regulation into corporate-friendly regulation.

As TNC power increases in the era of globalization, their capacity to dictate outcomes is also enhanced. Due to lack of political will on the part of many governments, as well as the lack of effective and democratic international institutions, corporations gained access to decision-making processes to the detriment of people and nature. Will Johannesburg be another triumph for corporate globalization? IBON Features  

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Some examples of MEAs in conflict with WTO rules.

* The Convention on Biological Diversity s Biosafety Protocol - Contradicts with WTO rules on what governments can do to regulate GMOs. This convention provides that governments have the right to ban imports of GMOs if they suspect damaging impacts, while the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Measures restricts governments from taking such precautionary measures without conclusive scientific evidence of harm.

*The Kyoto Protocol
- On increasing the required fuel efficiency of automobiles in some nations, the implementation has been threatened with WTO challenges on the grounds that such measures would discriminate against imports.

* The Convention on the Law of the Sea
- The Straddling Stocks Treaty (to protect migratory fish species, the direct result of a call made at the Earth Summit) has been questioned when the European Union threatened Chile with a WTO challenge for blocking Spanish ships from landing swordfish that had been caught in violation of the treaty.

* The Basel Convention on the Trade in Hazardous Wastes
- The provision encouraging domestic handling of toxic materials before exporting them has been under scrutiny for violating the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) investment rules that are now being proposed in the WTO.

 (Source: From Doha to Johannesburg by Victor Menotti, International Forum on Globalization)  

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