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Can big business save the planet?
By Kevin Spurgaitis
The United Church Observer
September 2010
Philanthro-capitalists are putting their money where their morals
are, using cash and clout to redefine the meaning of good business
Resting comfortably in his den in Omaha, Nebraska, watching the horrors
of Hurricane Katrina play out on his TV, renowned investor Warren
Buffett first decides to send relief supplies to New Orleans before
resolving to fix his broken country. In a mountain resort in Maui,
he then gathers 16 billionaires and mega-millionaires, a gang of do-gooders
that includes currency speculator George Soros, media mogul Ted Turner
and comedian Bill Cosby. Their mission: guaranteeing health care and
living wages for all, helping to unionize Walmart and creating the
People’s Chamber of Commerce. With such wealth and resources at their
disposal, they see to it that America is, indeed, reborn.
That’s the wild-eyed premise of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!,
a 700-page populist fantasy written by consumer activist Ralph Nader
— what he describes as “a fictional vision that could become a new
reality.” Four hundred of the world’s wealthiest people control more
assets than the poorest three billion, Nader notes in the book. If
these super-rich stopped wallowing in “leisurely drudgery,” they could
change things for the better.
So can big business really save the planet? The track record of corporate
capitalism is hardly squeaky clean. Think of Dow Chemical or R. J.
Reynolds Tobacco. But observers like Nader argue big business contains
the seeds of profound social change, too. After all, globalization
has helped spread democracy, increased wealth and education levels,
and diversified local economies, according to New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman, one of the pre-eminent voices on globalization. Claiming
an interest in the welfare of society, some visionary CEOs are now
instilling their companies with ethical principles and a spirit of
altruism.
Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, is fast becoming a part of
everyday business. It has led companies to reform their organizational
practices, to give generously to good causes and to form partnerships
with non-profit groups concerned with the environment and public welfare.
Critics, however, argue that corporations aren’t actually seeking
to better the planet; they’re merely trying to win the public’s trust
with a multibillion-dollar public relations effort. CSR skeptics also
wonder whether big businesses will still be big-hearted during tough
economic times — and if they can ever be as efficient as NGOs and
various levels of government.
Over the past two decades, CSR has blossomed as an idea, if not a
practical program. Public outcry likely had something to do with it.
When the media exposed sweatshop conditions at some of Nike’s Asian
factories during the 1990s, concerned consumers boycotted the sportswear
company. In 1995, Greenpeace protesters mobilized against Shell Oil
after the company announced its plans to dispose of an old oil rig,
the Brent Spar, by sinking it in the North Sea. Pharmaceutical companies,
too, were forced to respond to the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa.
“Government, activists, and the media have become adept at holding
companies to account for the social consequences of their activities,”
wrote CSR experts Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the December 2006
Harvard Business Review. “As a result, CSR has emerged as an inescapable
priority for business leaders in every country.”
When top executives begin to realize the impact of their choices on
their surroundings, “the guilt is enormous,” according to Helen-Jane
Nelson, director of Cecara Consulting Limited in the United Kingdom.
As she told EnlightenNext magazine in 2005, “We’re at a point where
leaders are beginning to recognize that their businesses are not sustainable,
that the whole way that they have been doing business — the pursuit
of continual growth — is not sustainable. The planet cannot tolerate
it.”
The epitome of corporate altruism is Bill Gates. The tech tycoon,
who with an estimated US$53 billion ranked second in Forbes magazine’s
2010 list of the world’s richest people, certainly doesn’t resemble
a spandex-suited superhero. In fact, he looks more like a mild-mannered,
behind-the-desk alter ego. But Gates, the founder and former CEO of
Microsoft, is one of the world’s biggest philanthropists. This past
decade, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to enhance health
care and reduce extreme poverty globally. To date, the couple has
given more than US$28 billion of their own money to the foundation.
Together with investor Warren Buffett, they’ve also launched the Giving
Pledge, asking hundreds of billionaire Americans to give away at least
half of their wealth to charity during their lifetime or after their
death. More than 30 U.S. billionaires, including Ted Turner, have
since made the pledge.
At the 2008 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Bill Gates advocated
a “creative capitalism” in which big corporations integrate doing
good into their way of doing business. He noted that “capitalism harnesses
self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways, but only on behalf
of those who can pay.” Creative capitalism would extend the benefits
of a free-market system to the world’s poor.
One company that has taken up the CSR banner is Coca-Cola. Its production
plants are working with civil society and governments to implement
a source-water protection plan by 2013. In partnership with the World
Wildlife Fund, Coca-Cola has also started promoting sustainable agricultural
practices and the conservation of the world’s most important freshwater
river basins.
Says WWF Canada president and CEO Gerald Butts, “Coke has an enormous
footprint all over the world and not just within their own operations.
But the decisions they make on relatively arcane subjects, like procurement
policy, have a big impact on ecosystems all over the world. For example,
they’re one of the world’s largest purchasers of sugar cane and citrus
fruits, and if they decide that they’re only going to buy sugar and
citrus fruits produced in a responsible way, it’s going to benefit
nature greatly.”
The principal goal of WWF’s partnership with Coca-Cola, however, is
helping the soft-drink company reduce its own water consumption and
carbon emissions. “If you want to change the world for the better,”
Butts says, “you’ve got to deal with the types of activities that
have made it for the worse. And when organizations like Coca-Cola
are willing to make really substantive changes in their operations
in order to make that happen, I think it’s almost a moral responsibility
to guide them along that process.”
In the future, Butts adds, the WWF will work with more companies willing
to overhaul their practices. “These partnerships are really important
because we’ve had a long history of people in business and the environmental
movement shouting at each other across a high wall, and not much has
been accomplished through that approach. It’s time to take a different
one, even one that’s risky for our own brand.”
Coca-Cola remains under scrutiny from watchdog organizations that
accuse it of paying lip service to good corporate citizenship. Considering
it bills itself as a “hydration” company, Coca-Cola certainly has
an “insatiable thirst for water,” says Amit Srivastava, co-ordinator
of the India Resource Center, which supports movements against corporate
globalization. According to the centre, Coca-Cola used an estimated
290-billion litres of water in 2006 — enough to meet the entire world’s
drinking water needs for 10 days. But until recently, the company
converted as much as two-thirds of the freshwater it used into waste
water.
In India, where 70 percent of the population derives a living from
the land, many rural communities do not have ready access to water
due to the control of local water resources by Coca-Cola and other
companies. “Such an abusive relationship with water is downright criminal,”
Srivastava says. He dismisses Coca-Cola’s CSR initiatives as “a frantic
effort to repair its increasingly blemished image.”
Corporate-caused disasters can also raise doubts about a company’s
professed commitment to social responsibility. This past spring and
summer, after a blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, millions of
litres of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, soiling nearly 200 kilometres
of coastline and threatening some of the United States’ richest ecosystems.
BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, was the principal developer
of the oil field where the rig was operating.
Just a decade ago, BP began marketing itself as “Beyond Petroleum.”
But it didn’t take long for the United States Occupational Safety
and Health Administration to fine the oil giant US$21 million for
safety violations leading to a March 2005 explosion at a Texas City
refinery that killed 15 people and injured 170. The following year,
a BP pipeline leaked nearly 900,000 litres of oil into Alaska’s Prudhoe
Bay — the worst onshore oil spill in the state’s history. According
to a congressional investigation, the spill was caused by negligence
and cost-cutting.
“BP is an amazing example of hypocrisy,” says Philip Mattera, director
of the Corporate Research Project, a national resource centre in Washington,
D.C., that promotes corporate and government accountability. “Here
is a company that really prided itself on being socially responsible,”
he observes, but the evidence now coming out reveals a “culture of
recklessness” behind its operations.
While Mattera acknowledges some claims of social entrepreneurship
may be sincere, he contends that many business leaders are only jumping
on the CSR bandwagon to counteract the increasing cynicism people
have about large corporations. “When a company spends more on advertising
its environmental friendliness than on environmental actions, that’s
‘greenwash,’ the phenomenon where corporations preserve and expand
their markets by posing as friends of the Earth. It’s completely cosmetic,”
he says.
As “philanthro-capitalism” continues to boom, critics warn that the
whims of the free market can’t be allowed to displace a vibrant public
sphere. Safeguarding the environment and improving public welfare
are the distinct roles of NGOs and the public sector, Srivastava argues.
While social movements have years of experience in these areas, multinationals
are now moving in without knowing “the ABCs” of collective reform.
You can’t buy social change, he says.
Srivastava continues, “Whether we’re talking about the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation or Coca-Cola, they have this whole market approach
to solving problems.” But the market’s mood is always changing. Private
enterprises, he insists, won’t be present during economically depressed
times or when they’re forced out of business altogether. For others,
he says, CSR may be a “passing fancy.”
Businesses aren’t charities, observes Harvard professor Michael Porter.
At the same time, he rejects the idea that corporate growth comes
at the expense of social welfare, or vice versa. Business and society
are “interdependent,” he argues, and a company’s social and business
agendas should go hand in hand. In a May edition of Business Week,
he encourages companies to take a strategic approach to CSR and change
their practices “in ways that enhance competitiveness while simultaneously
advancing economic and social conditions in the communities” where
they operate. By forging mutually beneficial relationships at the
local level, big business will regain its legitimacy and “give purpose
to capitalism.”
In Nader’s Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!, do-gooder billionaire
Warren Buffett isn’t on a messianic mission. But he and his fellow
billionaires awaken to their responsibility to help build “a great
and caring society.” Of course, whether business leaders can achieve
in real life the sustainability Nader touts in fiction is another
story.
FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. India Resource Center is making this article available in our efforts to advance the understanding of corporate accountability, human rights, labor rights, social and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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