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Forums, October 2004 Click on a link to see Past Forum notes: IS CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY A PR STUNT OR A CHANGE OF DIRECTION IN CAPITALISM? DARFUR SHOULD THE WEST INTERVENE? CAN OFFICIAL AND PRIVATE AID COEXIST? HOW DO WE HALT THE GLOBALISATION OF CRIME Global Development Forum 27th October Is Corporate Social Responsibility a PR stunt or a change of direction in capitalism? Chair: Dr Fareda Banda (Lecturer in African Law, SOAS) Speakers: Lord McNally of Blackpool (Vice-President Weber Shandwick International, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords) Ms Deborah Doane (Chair of the Corporate Social Responsibility coalition, Associate Fellow of the New Economics Foundation) Mr Tom Burke (Adviser to Rio Tinto Zinc, former Director of the Green Alliance) Ms Fanny Calder (Chatham House)
Lord McNally Some people say that CSR is a gimmick, a passing fad. There are problems selling CSR. There are many attacks on the wickedness of the corporate sector, but it does little to change corporate behaviour. We need to change the corporate DNA. There is a role for legislation to underpin voluntary activity. CSR is moving in the right direction. With the growth of ethical investment and shareholder power, the corporate sector is under pressure to become socially responsible. How do we get a company interested in CSR? It could strengthen their brand and reputation, staff motivation (companies with good CSR record have a much slower staff turnover) and shareholder satisfaction. CSR is the 21st century concept of corporate governance. Globalisation of products and marketing with 24-7 media coverage has meant that the coverage on CSR of a company is very far reaching. Companies should be taking legal responsibility for the behaviour of their overseas subsidiaries.
Deborah Doane CSR is a big public relations exercise not benefiting those it should. It is corporate spin. Those companies practicing CSR, such as tobacco companies, British Aerospace manufacturing arms, claim to have good social responsibility and yet what they sell contradicts that. They may listen to stakeholder dialogue but will not act on it. The big problem is that we all rely on economic growth but that isn’t necessarily helping sustainable development. The ethical consumer is a myth. There are 30,000 different products in an average supermarket. 83% of people intend to act ethically. 5% actually are ethical consumers. In the USA this 5% is going down as they become more concerned about security. There is a huge lack of legal accountability. For example, farmers for Tesco complain about having no contracts and therefore nothing for the farmer to hold Tesco to account with. They have no guarantees of being paid. No codes of conduct can be challenged using CSR. It all depends on the demand from investors who currently don’t care about social responsibility. CSR fails to tackle the big problems of our time. To be socially responsible we need governments to step in to make it effective.
Tom Burke The answer to the question ‘Is Corporate Social Responsibility a PR stunt or a change of direction in capitalism?’ is that sometimes it is a PR stunt and sometimes it is a change of direction. There is no such place as the corporate sector. There is a fantastic variety of bodies making up the corporate world, just like the NGO world etc. There is the type cast view of a corporation who is driven by the primacy of profit, just like the typecast view of an NGO – the communists trying to bring down the capitalists. We need to find a zone of mutuality. We need to make sure that we can build conditions to make it possible to alleviate poverty. Corporations in the 21st century have to be ethically and socially responsible. We need to try to identify those companies moving in this direction and reward them, just as we need to hold to account those companies who are not joining with this move towards ethical and social responsibility.
Fanny Calder We need to bring different actors together to find a mutual interest. Businesses have huge impacts, positive and negative. There are enormous weaknesses in developing country governments – they are often corrupt and easily influenced. There is serious work to be done in transforming the way the world is at the moment. What can we do to get as much out of CSR as possible? We need to mainstream it. Companies by themselves cannot achieve that mainstreaming. We must take a more holistic view. It important to develop governance to hold companies to account especially in developing countries. Businesses are looking at ways that they can start helping the poor as part of their business case. Can big business offer them something they are not getting? The government do not have the will or the electoral interest to put this at the forefront of their agenda. However, if we get businesses to invest, we can fill the gap. We don’t know yet whether CSR is a new direction but if we think holistically and bring governments around the table then we could start making progress with it.
Questions: What would be the most important step that we could take to ensure that CSR works in favour of the poor? The panel felt that the key might well be that we should enforce a rule that companies should behave abroad in the same way as they do in the UK. There should not be any incentives (i.e. bribes) without being forced to disclose them here. We should support initiatives such as the “publish what you pay” campaign for the extractive industries. Should the UN perhaps set a panel to investigate the work of companies that claim CSR in their work in the South? The panel felt that this would be a worthwhile
initiative because of the weakness of CSR is indeed that anyone can
claim what they want and it is the supervision of the claim that matters.
Global Development Forum 20th October Darfur, should the west intervene?
Can Official and Private Aid Co-exist?
Johnny Grimond There are yes and no answers to whether the West should intervene. If the crisis was due to an act of God then of course we would intervene. It the Government were standing in the way then yes we would intervene if we didn’t make the situation worse. If the Government were the cause of the crisis, yes we should intervene but the chances of really doing good are greatly reduced. National interest: the first duties of a government are to its own people. Intervention is fine on moral grounds, but what about national interest and the possible threat that this may bring to your own people? The crisis: 1 million people displaced. 100,000 lives lost, 70,000 have died of hunger and illness in the last 7 months. 5,000 people are dying each month. The World Health Organisation is saying that this will rise to 10,000. Even Colin Powell has called this genocide. The Sudanese government are repeatedly breaking their word. We could intervene with force, but the West, acting on its own, uninvited by the African Union, would be in a difficult situation. The West has not been motivated by anti-Islamic feelings for its interventions. However, any intervention in Darfur could be seen like that. Sudan is mainly Muslim, and there could be a real danger of misinterpretation which would lead to a grave situation. In less than half a century of independence there have been 5 coups and 37 years of civil war. None of this will be put quickly right by any intervention. The ideal intervention would be with the support of the United Nations and the African Union. Ahmet Diraige The West should intervene. They should feel obliged to. In the Cold War the West always intervened. With the end of the Cold War we have a new world order – and in that new world order human rights should not be violated anywhere in the world. It is the duty of the international community to intervene. People have been deliberately displaced from their homes in Darfur. Human rights and human lives are being violated. We are not asking for people to change the government but help the helpless. Even in the camps for the displaced the government do not leave them alone, they cannot get away from the government or the militias. They need to be saved. The government in Sudan is ideologically driven; they are serving that ideology, not the people. The West are hesitant to intervene due to Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s why the UN have appointed a commission to investigate whether there have been acts of genocide in Darfur. Moira Reddick, Red Cross Darfur is a complex environment to work in. We need to be clear about the intent behind wanting to intervene. The impact of this crisis is upon all groups involved. The settled villagers in one community will help the displaced in this situation. Which in turn means that those who are not really in a position to help start to suffer further. No one has been talking in debates over the issues so far, about the long term help needed for the area. There are issues all over Sudan and intervention needs to be fully informed about the entire situation and likely consequences. Questions that spring to mind are: what do we mean by intervention? If there were to be intervention would it result in better protection? Is this the most effective way to engage with the government of Khartoum? Public debate Is there genocide? Members of the panel were undecided; genocide is the intention to wipe out a population or part of a population, and this is the case in Darfur. No, it is not genocide, stated another; it is a set of circumstances that pit one group of peoples against another. Is Sudan a failed state? Probably. It certainly is a state that in the long term is not viable as it is. It is too large. The Government of Khartoum cannot govern. The traditional fights between the Northern people of Sudan and those in the South are not along religious lines; there is a strong element of tribalism. Is the West, with the pollution it creates, not partly responsible for the environmental destruction of the area? We cannot blame the North just on its own. Certainly global warming has upset the traditional balance, but it is much more basically an issue of human rights and human wrongs. The West should intervene because of the gross violation that is taking place. Global Development Forum 13th October
The British Government, through the Department for International Development, which spends our money, is taking a range of decisions that are harming the developing world. I have just returned from South Africa where I have seen at first hand what happens in townships like Soweto where poor people have been chucked out of their homes because they cannot afford to pay the water bills. In the particular case I have witnessed, the local community eventually took up protests and the houses were returned to the people who had been chucked out. The average person in Soweto cannot cope with the bills for the basic utilities and their income is well below the bills they received from the service providers. Yet, the thrust of British aid is towards developing more privatisation and DFID are using consultants such as the Adam Smith Institute (International) and Price Waterhouse Cooper to encourage poorer countries’ governments towards privatisation. This is going to help British corporations but not the countries. DFID have done some real harm to these countries, they are fake poverty relief programmes. The welfare of the rich is being put above the welfare of the poor. People are dying as a result of DFID policies and this is being done in the name of our aid budget.
Will Day I joined CARE because they were one of the few organisations that concentrated on providing loans rather than giving straight aid. At the time they were one of the few bodies that offered microcredit facilities. It is more effective to lend funds to enable people to stand on their own two feet rather than to give aid. The relationship has more dignity. It is based on trust and helps people stand on their own two feet. We need to work with small and medium enterprises, not the large companies, but the ones that really are in the communities and will make a difference to the people living there. We need to build trust and relationships.
To achieve the millennium development goals, there are, for example, an unimaginably high number of people to connect to a water supply. The figure is around 250,000 people need to be connected every day for the next 10 years. It cannot be achieved. Where do we find the resources and the skills to do this? Are there different ways of boosting capacity to meet the needs of poor people? Local authorities look for ways of financing it, but investment is difficult to come by.
The cause of international development has moved to the centre of international politics. NGOs and the government are much closer than they seem, for example DFID is funding NGO programmes in Darfur. Change only happens when the two strands – private aid and official aid - come together. At the time of the Abacha Government in Nigeria, the British Government gave some $1 billion in aid to the country. It is widely estimated that Abacha in his period in office stole around £3 to £4 billion from his country. Is it right to give aid without conditionality? We need to talk to people about whether we have got the conditionality right. In some areas people are keen that there is conditionality because it means some sort of control from the outside on the greed of their own leaders. Consultancies such as the Adam Smith Institute International are providing support to the Palestinian authority to help in negotiations with Israel. The Adam Smith Institute International is a separate activity of the Adam Smith Institute in the UK; they are quire different and operate with a different philosophy. Debt relief helps developing countries make progress. Trade is the single most important issue to help tackle poverty. There are also things they can do to help them selves, such as good governance. We need to get economic development into those countries. However, where there is war and conflict there is no chance for development.
Aid isn’t the answer to poverty but it
does make a difference. Progress has been made.
Global Development
Forum, How Do We Halt The Globalization of Crime?
In the Chair; Mr James Curtis Panellists: Mr Tarique Ghaffur,
Ms Christien Van der Anker, Mr Callum Rankine. Advances in technology (internet),
economic migration, cheap flights, Europe – these have
all made the world a smaller place. There are three changes
we see because of this: There is a growth in new crime – cyber crime, fraud, paedophilia, and other global techno crimes. Here, there are huge gaps in police intelligence. Solutions: intelligence led operations in partnership with other law enforcement agencies. We need to build capacity to reach those communities currently difficult to reach. We must improve victim support. There are huge resourcing gaps - the political drive is always for more police on the streets and lifestyle improvements, we need improvements in other areas also. Police do have new tools, disruption techniques using legislation, plea bargaining, compulsory giving of evidence. Also, we work with many of the source countries; the UK is working with 21 other countries on these issues. There are now discussions about the possibility of international law making and global policy with new institutions to handle problems we experience globally.
Trafficking human beings: There are no solid figures, no data between countries. In 2002 the US state department estimated that between 700,000 and 4 million people were trafficked worldwide. The ILO also in 2002 estimated that 1.2 million children were trafficked each year worldwide. Trafficking in Europe has been estimated at 500,000 each year. These very varied estimates show the problem of data gathering. Up to 1500 women are trafficked into the UK each year. Anti Slavery International says that tens of 1000s of people are trafficked in Europe each year. It is important to note that trafficking is not just of women and children. Also, it is not due to naivety that people end up being trafficked, but desperation. People who are trafficked work in
various areas: Migration: By countries putting up barriers people will find new ways of coming in and are therefore more vulnerable as a result. It is not always organised crime involved in trafficking. The international consensus emphasises
2 things For the victims of trafficking the government needs to start from a human rights perspective. We now have extensive programmes for victim support. Deportation is delayed while we investigate the traffickers. We must emphasise the prevention
of trafficking. We need to build capacity within the police
forces and encourage countries to invest in their own economies
for the young to get jobs locally. We need a victim centred
approach. We should protect them whilst they are here and offer
them the opportunity to apply for asylum. Illegal wildlife trade: Resources are being used up. We must use resources sustainably so that species survive. The illegal wildlife trade in the UK alone is worth millions of pounds. Bangkok CITES conference: this takes place every 3 years. 166 countries are involved. This conference is a law making body and will define the laws for the next 3 years over wildlife trafficking. The Metropolitan Police have the Wildlife Crime Unit. Illegal trafficking has increased. There will always be a market for those who can afford it. Example: Great Ape babies will be captured and to do this the whole family has to be killed to get to the baby. The rest of the family will be sold for meat. The Ebola virus – this is from chimpanzees and we can catch it. This is everywhere in West Africa. When people are preparing the chimpanzee meat they will catch this virus. We need to help stem the wildlife trade. We need more resources. The government needs to take notice. Now that we are a part of Europe the EU does have strict laws. However, the rest of Europe is not as strict in practice as we currently are. NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service) – we can share their intelligence and work together. We need to keep the pressure on the government. There followed a discussion from the floor, with several members of the public asking how the illegal trade in “bush” meat could be stamped out. In reply to a question on women trafficked into the sex trade, Dr Van der Acker stated that typically the women involved would be someone 3who might start off thinking that she could cope with the situation and then, because of the extreme brutality of the people involved, lost out altogether. In reply to another question, the
three panellists thought that it was unlikely that global crime
could be ever controlled. Criminals were ahead of the law enforcement
agencies. There is too much money involved. On the other side
the law enforcement bodies are too separate and, although there
is more and more cooperation, there is corruption, there are
too many opportunities and the criminals are always ahead of
the police forces. This unique volume aims to raise awareness about the complexity of contemporary slavery and it promotes looking at trafficking, bonded labour, child labour and abuse of domestic migrant workers under the heading of slavery, in order to empower campaigns to eradicate slavery once and for all. Even where national and international laws are in place, compliance is lacking and economic pressures leave poor people vulnerable to current forms of slavery. The book provides relevant policy recommendations, such as respect for victims' rights and assesses longer term strategies for change, including Fair Trade, reparations for slavery in the past, the Tobin tax and development ethics. 'Christien van den Anker unearths copious examples of appalling mistreatment of the vulnerable by the unscrupulous on a daily basis...there is no doubting her sincerity about raising awareness of what is going on in poorer parts of the world.' - The Guardian December 2003 288 pp 216x138mm Order your copy from www.palgrave.com |