CSR and the Developing World
“Corporate social responsibility”
is irresponsible.
It tramples on the rights and freedoms
of the world’s poorest people.
Remarks by Paul Driessen,
CPAC 2006 Conference, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC,
February 10, 2006
Let’s get one thing straight right from the outset. 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 socially responsible.
But that’s not the issue. As I observe in my book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power ? Black death, when it comes to corporate social responsibility, two issues predominate.
NUMBER ONE – An axis of activists is co-opting these simple truths, to promote narrow political agendas.
They claim 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.
They’ve been hugely successful in promoting this sanitized, idealized version of CSR. But let’s face facts. In far too many cases, CSR is defined, marketed and imposed:
a) To promote anti-science, anti-technology, anti-development and anti-people ideologies that Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore properly condemns as morally and intellectually bankrupt; and
b) 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 courts and union halls.
NUMBER TWO – CSR is hardly a lighthouse. It’s much more like the bonfires pirates once lit along rugged coastlines, to lure unsuspecting ships onto the rocks, where they were plundered and destroyed.
Even worse, there aren’t enough lifeboats, and it’s the people in steerage who suffer the most horrendous losses. Let’s keep that in mind, as we begin exposing “corporate social responsibility” to the bright light and cleansing action of open, robust debate.
CSR advocates have done a brilliant job of focusing attention on issues that reflect their ideologies – and deflecting attention away from the harm their policies and programs are causing.
By promoting concepts like sustainable development and the precautionary principle, they protect healthy, affluent First World activists from distant, conjectural, exaggerated risks. Worse, they do so by imposing real, immediate, life-threatening risks on the world’s most powerless and destitute people.
The theory of catastrophic global warming is a good example. The questionable science is bad enough. But the climate scare is being used to attack free enterprise … give activists and bureaucrats control over energy, business, housing, transportation and economic development … and justify opposition to electricity generation in the Third World.
The activists’ latest cause is “conflict diamonds.” The diamonds have blood on them, Leonardo DiCaprio tells us. Don’t buy, don’t sell. I’m sure there’s a carat of truth to that. But whatever blood those diamonds might have on them is a drop in the bucket, compared to what CSR activists have spilled.
The Circle of Life – and the Circle of Death
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 Katrina and Rita. Just think about how many lives were affected by the lack of electricity, refrigeration, safe drinking water, housing, sanitation and food. Reflect on how we launched massive insecticide spraying programs right after those storms, 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 killer diseases – and who never enjoy the basic necessities that we often take for granted.
For these steerage passengers, the Circle of Life is has been replaced by a Circle of Death.
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 Third World poverty.
Let’s put these numbers in perspective. Take the tragic death toll from Katrina and Rita – 1,000 people – and multiply it times 10,000 and you get the annual death toll from lung and intestinal diseases.
Take America’s annual death toll from West Nile virus (100) and multiply it times 10,000 – and you get the minimum annual death toll from malaria.
Corporate social responsibility advocates ought to be doing everything in their power to improve these intolerable conditions, and save lives. However, in all too many cases, they say and do nothing. In fact, they help perpetrate and perpetuate the problems.
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. 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 – reducing disease and death rates even further.
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, Swaziland and Mozambique also used DDT to achieve tremendous success.
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, oil 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 oil and 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 these operations, and workers and their families will end up in Third World slums.
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 a garment or shoe factory.
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 a lousy 20 percent – which means hundreds of thousands of extra, needless deaths that DDT could prevent.
The real meaning of sustainable development
These policies, they argue, preserve indigenous cultures, while fostering sustainable development and protecting people from the dangers of global warming, chemicals and “Frankenfoods.”
But as Kenya’s June Arunga observes: “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 CSR activist or Hollywood celebrity who’s willing to “go native” for even one month – and live in a state-of-the-art mud hut in malaria-infested rural Africa, under the “indigenous” conditions they extol and perpetuate.
I’d like to see these neo-natives drink the locals’ contaminated water … eat their paltry, mold-infested food … 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 90 degrees, and inside the bed net it’s a hundred.
And do it all with no bug spray, 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 inevitably come down with the fevers, chills and convulsions of acute malaria.
That’s the real meaning of sustainable development, appropriate technology, the precautionary principle and corporate social responsibility.
That’s why colleagues and I have launched the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW! campaign. On at least one lethal radical Green / CSR ideology, we want to change US and global policies, establish new rules – and begin saving lives.
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 – people like David Keene, Ed Meese, John Boone, Elizabeth Whelan and Ed Crane. We hope you too will endorse it.
It’s already helped change USAID policies, and begun saving lives. But we need to do much more, if we are to end malaria’s and CSR’s unconscionable impacts on the Third World’s poor.
An ethical alternative to CSR
Simply put, 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 their families from the real, immediate, life-threatening risks that confront them every day.
They don’t need sustainable development. They need sustained development.
They don’t need CSR the way it’s defined and practiced today. They need policies that apply the same standards of honesty, transparency, accountability and liability to non-profit 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 policies that ensure that government agencies don’t just have power and authority – but also have real accountability – for the consequences of their actions, and for the success or failure of their programs.
In short, they don’t need corporate social responsibility. They need GLOBAL social 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 disease, malnutrition and lack of electricity …
? toward all concerns, not merely environmental concerns …
? for all corporations, for-profit and not-for-profit alike, including activist NGOs, foundations and government agencies …
? and for supporting property rights, free enterprise, enforceable laws and contracts, reasonable regulations and modern technology – the keys to innovation, wealth creation, health, 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.
We can begin right here. Join in the debate. Sign our Declaration. Ensure that CSR becomes GSR. And help address the vital ethical and social responsibility issues I’ve described.
Do that, and you can help ensure that the world’s poor can defeat the eco-imperialist and CSR forces arrayed against them – and finally take what Rabbi Daniel Lapin calls “their rightful place among the Earth’s prosperous people.”
Thank you.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ? Black death (www.Eco-Imperialism.com). He is also active in the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW anti-malaria campaign. For more information on that effort and the malaria crisis, see www.FightingMalaria.org and www.3billionandcounting.com
His book is in its second US printing, has been published in Argentina (Spanish) and India (English), and will soon be available in Germany (German) and Italy (Italian).
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