Supping with the devil

David Cromwell

When Chris Tuppen, a senior manager with British Telecom, was granted space a couple of years ago in a green pressure group's magazine, he made a plea for business and the green movement to "settle their differences" and "work together". But what he was advocating was simply a greener kind of capitalism: more energy-efficient household appliances, for instance. His acquiescence in the global economy and the profit imperative over people "from the corner shop to the largest of multinationals" is typical of the wrong-headed business approach to the fundamental environmental and social problems we face today.

Vague talk in the business community about "sustainable development" hides the truth that corporate greed for economic growth is killing people and the planet. Business advertising - £9.2 billion is spent in the UK every year - even shapes the way information is disseminated - or not disseminated - in the public arena. Oil companies drape themselves in pretty pictures of the environment even while despoiling it, and biotech giants make specious claims about using technology to feed the world while filling their pockets.

If the business community was at all sincere about working in partnership for a genuine green future it would reject endless economic growth, the profit imperative and the deadly deceits of the global capitalist economy. It is a common ploy to neuter opposition by assimilating it into the "business as usual" brigade and grassroots organisations should not fall for it.

In the UK, there is an influential player in the wider environmental movement called the Green Alliance, set up by Tom Burke, an environmental adviser to the previous (Conservative) government. Early in 1999, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook chose a meeting hosted by the Green Alliance to unveil a modest - make that very modest - initiative to combat global warming. The audience comprised business representatives, non-governmental organisations, civil servants and journalists. It was Cook's first major speech on the international environment since becoming Foreign Secretary 18 months earlier. Under the prosaic title of "Energy Challenge for Business", Cook announced a green fund worth £500,000 to spend on clean energy projects in developing countries. From one perspective Cook's climate challenge would kickstart much-needed renewable energy and conservation projects in poor countries. From another perspective, the fund was just a tax give-away to western companies to provide them with enhanced access to energy markets in the South.

According to its website, the Green Alliance "enables constructive problem-solving between government, business and non-governmental organisations on difficult issues." While I think that some of this can be marginally useful, my own feeling is that such an approach does not address the deep-seated problems afflicting society. I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was telephoned by the Alliance's cheery publicity officer. She'd seen a letter of mine in The Independent which compared the trivial cuts in greenhouse gas emissions agreed under Kyoto - 5.2 per cent for developed countries - versus the best estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the reductions required to stabilise rising temperatures: at least 60 per cent. "Why haven't you returned the application form I sent you to join the Green Alliance?", she asked. "You seem like the sort of person we need on board". An ominous statement indeed.

The implicit assumption of the Green Alliance is that big business is essentially well-meaning - that it wants to work in "partnership" with other interested parties to "solve" social and environmental problems. Hold that thought. Now, consider the machinations of the corporate lobby to weaken environmental, labour and health safeguards through such organisations as the World Trade Organisation, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the European Roundtable of Industrialists, the Transatlantic Partnership and other elite groupings. The level of intrigue, deception and stealth involved in all of this would seem exaggerated even in a James Bond movie. Under economic globalisation, governments not only bend over backwards to attract transnational capital and corporations but seem intent on breaking the backs of their own people in the Sisyphean task of becoming "internationally competitive".

Take biotech interests, for example. John Krebs, head of the new Food Standards Agency in the UK, claimed recently in New Scientist that "the debate about genetically modified crops has stagnated over the past few years" such that we need an independent international panel of scientists akin to the IPCC "to separate the facts from the propaganda". The "independent" Food Standards Agency was set up by the government as food scare after food scare piled up in Britain; in particular, the link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nv-CJD) in humans.

An international panel of biotech scientists adjudicating impartially on GM crops might sound nice and cosy, but once again there is a massive false premise. Namely, that it's impossible to be neutral on a moving train, as Howard Zinn observes. Professor Krebs, former head of the government's Natural Environment Research Council, ignores the structure of economic and political power in society. No mention of the corporations who have been pushing the technology down the public's throat. Put bluntly, it is a fallacy to assume that good science will direct society's development when we are already being propelled in a direction that suits the interest of corporate and political elites at the expense of everyone else.

Recall the intense backstage business lobbying at the European Union for a biotech patents directive - all part of a bigger picture of corporate fixing of the rules to create a deregulated Europe, as Belen Balanya and co-authors from the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory convincingly show in their recent book "Europe, Inc." Brussels is crawling with corporate lobbyists. Inevitably, there are groups devoted specifically to boosting the biotechnology industry. The most important of these is EuropaBio, an umbrella organisation of virtually all the major players such as Bayer, Novartis, Monsanto Europe, Nestlé, Rhône-Poulenc, Solvay and Unilever. According to the multinational public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, which was responsible for setting up the infamous Global Climate Coalition, EuropaBio has an "indispensable direct role in the [EU] policy-making process".

When public opposition to GM food rose to fever pitch, Burson-Marsteller advised the industry not to participate in public debates. Instead, advised the PR firm, it should be left to "those charged with public trust in this area - politicians and regulators - to assure the public that biotech products are safe". It is one example of governments being used as tools by corporate interests. Rather than providing profit-making opportunities for corporations through biotechnological fixes, we should be addressing the fundamental political and economic conditions that maintain global poverty - in both the developing and "developed" countries.

Just one other example of governments as tools of elite interest. Western governments continue to channel billions of dollars of public subsidies into the fossil fuel industry while renewable options languish. In the meantime, sea levels and global temperature rise dangerously, polar ice melts and the frequency and intensity of catastrophic weather events - floods, hurricanes, droughts - increase alarmingly.

And so where does the Green Alliance's much-vaunted "constructive problem-solving" come into all of this? What evidence is there that transnational corporations pay more than lip service to such a notion? Instead, we need immense public pressure to make business and government do the right thing. Indeed, the ultimate goal has to be to devolve power to local communities, something which can only come about at the expense of the existence of enormous business conglomerates. Susan George rightfully says in her recent book "The Lugano Report" that "we have to oppose not just what corporations do, but what they are". In other words, big business is inherently unaccountable and anti-democratic, and has to be fundamentally reformed. As green activist Steven Gorelick says in the title of a report last year, echoing the late E. F. Schumacher, "Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidised".

By all means, let's work with locally-based small and medium-scale enterprises which demonstrate the capacity for ecological development and social justice. But the large corporations will have to be fought tooth and nail if there is going to be a healthy future for planet and people. Sadly, as long as the Green Alliance and others of their ilk fail to tackle societal problems at a root level, fail to work solely with progressive grassroots organisations, and fail to challenge the inherently unethical agenda of western governments and big business, they remain a part of the problem.

And what happened when I emailed all of this to the Green Alliance's well-meaning publicity officer? My message bounced back after 30 days with a rider saying that the message hadn't been collected by the recipient. Return to sender! No doubt just an electronic hitch - or does the truth hurt so much?

David Cromwell is an oceanographer and writer based in Southampton, UK. His first book, "Private Planet", will be published next year by Jon Carpenter (Charlbury, UK).