CSR and the Developing World

A timely essay on a vital subject
by Center senior advisor and Congress of Racial Equality senior policy advisor
Paul Driessen

Remarks delivered at the CSR Reconsidered 2005 Conference, held Wednesday, Nov. 2 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

See also the remarks at the same conference of Center senior fellow Nick Nichols Socialism Revisited?

At the risk of repeating what others have already said, let me begin by setting forth something I think we all solidly agree on:

All companies should always be honest, ethical and devoted to the well-being of our environment and of the publics they serve: employees, investors, customers and communities alike. It’s good business. It’s what’s expected. It’s moral.

HOWEVER, that is not the issue. The issue is that social and environmental activists are attempting to promote their political agendas – by co-opting this simple truth, and twisting it into self-serving notions about “corporate social responsibility” – CSR for short.

They insist that CSR is a lighthouse – an ethical beacon – that corporations must follow if they are to “earn their right to continue operating” … and create a cleaner, safer, more just world – a world that they say must based on sustainable development, renewable energy and the precautionary principle.

Unfortunately, they’ve been hugely successful up to now – as the conference elsewhere in this hotel attests. However, that success – and the sanitized, utopian version of CSR – must not be allowed to distract us from reality. 

The fact is, these terms have largely been defined, interpreted, marketed and imposed with two specific purposes in mind. All too often, they are used:

·         To help promote agendas that Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore properly condemns as morally and intellectually bankrupt – and consistently anti-science, anti-technology, anti-development and anti-people. And …

·         To silence critics, tarnish the reputations of companies that don’t go along to get along, give certain companies leverage against their competitors, and make up for power lost at ballot boxes or in union halls.

As to CSR being a lighthouse, I think it’s really more like the bonfires pirates once lit along Ireland’s coast, to lure unsuspecting ships onto the rocks, where they would be plundered and destroyed. Even worse, as in the case of the Titanic, there aren’t enough lifeboats, and it’s the people in steerage who suffer the most horrendous losses.

I’ve addressed this unpleasant reality at length in many of my essays and in my book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death. It is a truth that has been assiduously swept under the rug and rarely discussed in the polite, politically correct circles of BSR conferences … brie and white wine social events … board rooms, news rooms, congressional hearing rooms … UN conferences … and all too many religious sermons.

It’s time to lift the rug, and expose the truth about “corporate social responsibility” to the bright light of day, and the cleansing action of open, robust debate.

CSR advocates have done a brilliant job of disguising their eco-imperialist tendencies and effects. Through the use of concepts like sustainable development and the precautionary principle – and theories like catastrophic global warming and estrogenic chemicals – it protects healthy, affluent First World activists from distant, conjectural, exaggerated risks. Worse, it does so by imposing real, immediate, life-threatening risks on the world’s most powerless and destitute people.

The Circle of Life

As anyone who’s seen Disney’s Lion King knows, there is a circle of life. For humans, it is composed of electricity, disease prevention, clean water and nutrition. All are essential, and all are inter-connected.

Their vital importance ought to be obvious from Hurricanes Isabel, Katrina and Rita. Just think about how many lives have been affected by the lack of electricity, refrigeration, safe drinking water, decent housing, sanitation and adequate food. Reflect on how quickly we began massive insecticide spraying programs, to eliminate any threat of disease outbreaks.

Then try to imagine what life is like every day for two billion people who NEVER have electricity – who struggle to survive on less than $500 a year – who are wracked by disease – and who never enjoy the basic necessities that we too often take for granted.

Indoor pollution from their wood and dung fires causes 4 million deaths a year from tuberculosis and other lung infections. Unsafe water and spoiled food cause intestinal diseases that kill another 6 million people.

Over 800 million people are chronically undernourished, and 200 million children suffer from Vitamin A Deficiency.

A million children go blind annually from the deficiency, and 2 million die from starvation and diseases they might well survive with better nutrition.

Malaria and other insect-borne diseases infect over a half billion people every year – killing millions and contributing massively to the Third World’s endemic poverty.

Corporate social responsibility advocates ought to be doing everything in their power to improve these conditions, and save lives. However, as currently defined and practiced by most of the activists in attendance at that other conference – CSR says and does nothing about any of these problems. In fact, it helps perpetrate and perpetuate them.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity would generate jobs and prosperity, dramatically reduce lung and intestinal diseases, and help preserve habitats that people now chop into firewood.

Biotechnology would reduce crop losses from insects and plant disease, help alleviate hunger and malnutrition, and decrease the amount of land that must be cultivated to feed growing populations.

Insecticides would control mosquitoes and flies that spread killer diseases. In fact, just spraying tiny amounts of DDT on the inside walls of houses once, or twice a year, keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from even entering homes … reduces malaria rates by 75 percent or more … and enables doctors to provide the very best medicines to people who still get malaria.

Using this two-pronged approach – DDT plus ACT (Artemisia-based combination therapies) – South Africa slashed its malaria rates by 96 percent in just three years! Zambia and Mozambique also achieved tremendous success, using DDT in privately funded programs.

But extremist groups – and the foundations, companies and government agencies that support them under the guise of CSR – viscerally oppose fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power projects.

They fight bank financing of projects that would generate electricity, health, jobs and hope for the future – and use little children to confront Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase with accusations that they are “hurting the Earth” if they bankroll generating, logging or mining projects.

They battle biotechnology with almost religious passion – while wealthy foundations and organic food companies pour millions into the coffers of radical anti-biotech organizations.

They do everything they can to prevent countries from using insecticides – especially DDT.

They despise mining projects – even in areas where extracting minerals to meet the needs of modern societies is about the only available source of jobs and revenues. Close the mines and smelters, and those workers and their families will end up in the slums of Lima, Rio de Janeiro and other Third World cities.

They try to shut down so-called sweatshops – as though no jobs is better than low quality jobs. As though working as 12-year-old beggar, thief or prostitute is better than working in garment or shoe factory.

CSR literature rarely mentions these unhappy facts.

To deflect criticism over their callous policies, they promote solar panels that power a light bulb and radio in mud huts. They advocate wind turbines that spoil scenic vistas and kill birds, to produce trivial amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity. They extol subsistence farming that is land and labor intensive, and subject to massive crop losses. And they practically canonize bed nets that at best might reduce malaria by 20 percent.

The real meaning of sustainable development  

These approaches, they argue, preserve indigenous cultures and traditional lifestyles, while fostering sustainable development and protecting people from the dangers of modern chemicals and “Frankenfoods.”

But as Kenya’s Akinyi Arunga points out: “Cute, indigenous customs aren’t so charming when they make up one’s day-to-day existence. Then they mean indigenous poverty, indigenous malnutrition, indigenous disease and childhood death. I don’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I wish our so-called friends would stop imposing it on us.”

In fact, I would love to meet just one Green activist, Hollywood celebrity or CSR promoter who’s willing to “go native” for even one month – and take his family to live in a state-of-the-art mud hut in malaria-infested rural Africa, under the squalid “indigenous” conditions they extol and perpetuate.

I’d like to see these neo-natives drink the locals’ contaminated water, breathe polluted smoke from their wood and dung fires, endure swarms of diseased mosquitoes and tsetse flies – and swelter happily under bed nets, trying to sleep when the temperature in the hut is 95 degrees, and inside the bed net it’s 105.

And do it all with no DEET, no pesticides, no anti-malaria pills – and prepared to walk 20 miles to the nearest clinic, carrying their sick or dying child with them, when they’re inevitably afflicted with the agonizing fevers and convulsions of acute malaria.

That’s the real meaning of sustainable development, appropriate technology, the precautionary principle and corporate social responsibility.

These policies replace the Circle of Life with a Circle of Death – and their impact on Third World steerage passengers is horrendous.

To put them in terms we can better appreciate: Take the tragic death toll from Katrina and Rita (1000) and multiply it times 10,000 and you get the annual toll from lung and intestinal diseases.

Take our six-year toll from West Nile virus (600) and multiply it times 10,000 – and you get the death toll from malaria over the same period.

That’s why colleagues and I have launched the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW! campaign. We want to change US policies, establish new rules for bureaucrats who insist on spending vast sums on conferences and consultants – but not a dime on insecticides – and begin saving lives TODAY.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Congress of Racial Equality national chairman Roy Innis, and hundreds of physicians, clergy and human rights advocates have already signed our Declaration. We hope you too will endorse it – and help end malaria’s global reign of terror.

While we’re at it, let’s ask the businessmen and activists attending the BSR conference: Where do you stand on this? With children and parents suffering and dying from malaria? Or with self-interested bureaucrats, self-styled business ethicists, and anti-pesticide ideologues?

An ethical alternative to CSR

The world’s poor don’t need a precautionary principle that protects affluent Americans and Europeans from theoretical or exaggerated risks. They need one that safeguards poor families from the real, immediate, life-threatening risks that confront them every single day.

They don’t need sustainable development. They need sustained development.

They need policies that apply the same standards of honesty, transparency, accountability and liability to nonprofit corporations like Greenpeace, NRDC, Rainforest Action Network, Domini Social Investors, labor union pension funds and CERES – as to for-profit corporations like Enron and WorldCom.

They need to know that government agencies like Jong-Wook Lee’s World Health Organization, Paul Wolfowitz’s World Bank and Andrew Natsios’s USAID will not have just power and authority – but also real accountability for the success or failure of their programs.

In short, they don’t need corporate social responsibility. They need GLOBAL social responsibility – a “radical” new concept that emphasizes responsibility –

·         toward all people the world over, not merely to middle and upper classes in the First World who can afford to focus on concerns that dominate discussions about CSR, because they no longer have to worry about electricity, disease and malnutrition …

·         toward all concerns, not merely environmental concerns …

·         for all corporations, for-profit and not-for-profit alike, including activist NGOs, stakeholder groups and government agencies …

·         and for supporting property rights, free enterprise, enforceable laws and contracts, reasonable regulations and modern technology – the keys to health, innovation, wealth creation, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

GLOBAL social responsibility would help create a truly cleaner, safer, more ethical, more just world. It would help ensure that the world’s poor can finally enjoy just a few of the blessings that we almost view as our birthright –

It would help ensure that the world’s poor can finally take what Rabbi Daniel Lapin calls “their rightful place among the Earth’s prosperous people.”

Until then, we must do everything we can to debate and reform these fatally flawed concepts of corporate social responsibility.

You can begin right here, by joining our anti-malaria coalition – and talking with attendees at the Business for Social Responsibility conference. (Judging from some of the books on display in the BSR registration area, and some of the featured topics and speakers, there is certainly a need for our perspectives.)

With your help and input, perhaps next year the BSR program will invite some of us to be speakers, and will focus more on GLOBAL social responsibility – and less on BS.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ∙ Black death
www.Eco-Imperialism.com.

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