Corporate Capture

By George Monbiot, The Guardian. Posted August 22, 2002.

The German election could be the second this year to be won or lost on the environment. In New Zealand, the Labour party failed to win its anticipated overall majority, partly because of its determination to approve the planting of genetically modified crops. The Greens, who did better than expected, have threatened to bring the government down if it lets the plantings go ahead. In Germany, Edmund Stoiber seemed certain of victory, until the floods exposed the fact that his shadow cabinet contains no environment spokesman. Now that the Germans are rediscovering their dependency upon the natural world, Stoiber's anti-environmentalism could be fatal. As the Indian proverb says, if you drive nature out of the door with a broom, she will come back through the window with a pitchfork.

The environment is a long-term issue which has always suffered from the short-term imperatives of the political cycle. It has been treated, by governments all over the world, as a problem which can be endlessly deferred to the next administration. Now the problem is catching up with the politicians, but most of them have yet to notice. The fourth earth summit, which begins at the end of this week, looks certain to be a disaster.

It's not just that the summit will fail to resolve the earth's problems. Its decisions are likely to become a major cause of environmental destruction in their own right. The solution to the slow collapse of the earth's capacity to support human life, both the UN and most of the governments of the rich world have decided, is more of the problem.

The UN hopes for two kinds of outcome from the summit, which it calls type I and type II. Type I outcomes are the agreements brokered by governments. These negotiations, like those at all the previous earth summits, have so far been dominated by the EU and the US. While poorer nations have called for the rich countries to recognize their ecological debt to the rest of the world, to cough up the money they promised and failed to deliver 10 years ago and to find ways of holding big business to account, the rich world has insisted instead that the interests of the poor and the environment take second place to free trade.

Sections of the world trade agreement have simply been pasted into the draft negotiating text, ensuring that corporate freedom overrides environmental protection. The world's water supplies, climate, health and biodiversity will, from now on, the rich nations insist, be defended by means of "public-private partnerships": the US and EU want to do to the environment what the British government wants to do to the London Underground. To defend the world from the destruction brokered by multinational capital, governments will tie a ribbon round it and hand it to multinational capital.

But if the type I outcomes are likely to harm both the poor and the environment, the type II outcomes could be devastating. The UN has permitted big business to capture not just the results of the negotiations, but also the negotiating process itself. The corporations are moving into the vacuum left by the heads of state, and asserting their claim to global governance.

In principle, type II outcomes are voluntary agreements negotiated by governments, businesses and people's organizations. In practice, the corporations, being better funded and more powerful than the people's groups, are running the circus. They propose to regulate themselves through codes of practice, which in reality amount to little more than the rebranding of destructive activities as beneficial ones. As the Corporate Europe Observatory has shown, the original purpose of the Responsible Care program submitted by the chemical industry was to prevent the introduction of new health and safety laws after the Bhopal disaster. This, and the other schemes proposed by business, are likely to be listed as official outcomes of the summit.

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