Life on Earth: Who wins, the corporations or people?

Life on Earth: Who wins, the corporations or people?

Yanuar Nugroho, Researcher & Director, The Business Watch Indonesia,
Surakarta, Central Java, Yanuar-n@watchbusiness.org

"Control your destiny, or someone else will," is the famous
phrase of business consultant Welch (1992) when explaining how
strategic management in industry would very much affect the
progress of corporations. The saying might be right. On June 1 to
June 3, representatives of countries known as the Group of Eight
(G-8): Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States,
Canada, Japan and Russia, met on the shores of Lake Geneva in the
French Alpine city of Evian, France, to "control their destiny".

Promising to discuss a "global plan" to meet the Millennium
Development Goal, its agenda also could not but touch upon the
implications for the rest of the world, i.e. the poorest of the
poor. This concern was shown in rallies during the summit.

The summit seems not to have fulfilled its own agenda and to
have failed to address pressing issues on the environment,
development and health, facing the global economy. This failure
does not only apply to G-8 Evian but also to other world-level
summits, which have shown that the people's interests are
desperately neglected.

On environmental issues, the preparatory meetings held in
Paris in late April abstained from unequivocal statements that
would have enhanced the safety of marine transportation of
dangerous chemical substances, especially crude oil. Under
pressure from Japan, the G-8 environment ministers lifted the ban
on single-hulled oil tankers to serve as carriers of chemical
substances. Japan also opposed the strengthening of legal
responsibility of ship owners, which reflects Japan's economic
specific interests, such as the defense of its ship manufacturing
industry, and its heavy dependence on imported oil.

It reflects one of the most dangerous approaches to our earth
-- if only we could know how much our environment has suffered.
Today, 78 million barrels of oil are extracted per day and
natural gas production has reached 95 trillion cubic feet per
year, in addition to about 4 billion metric tons of natural gas
mining. Meadows (2000) stated that the production of natural gas
creates massive pollution, since it is extracted (and spilled),
shipped (and spilled), refined (generating toxins) and burned to
produce numerous pollutants, including carbon dioxide, which
traps outgoing energy and heats up the atmosphere. As a result,
carbon emissions have reached a rate of 6.5 million metric tons
this year, as global vehicle usage has reached 730 million --not
including air traffic, which has increased by a factor of six
since the 1970s.

On the water issue EU trade negotiators are using the World
Trade Organization (WTO) to open up other countries' water
sectors for the benefit of Europe's private sector water
industry, thus failing to meet its own ambition of halving the
proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and
sanitation by 2015.

According to Europe-based, non-governmental organization the
Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), in early April the first
proposal for a new 1 billion euro (US$1.17 billion) fund for
water investment in 77 developing countries was released. The
countries included those in Africa, the Caribbean, and the
Pacific (ACP), all former colonies of EU member states. This
proposal seemed more about corporate welfare than helping the
world's poorest, as then acknowledged by the EU Water Fund
presented at the G-8 meeting, based on proposals made by a panel
mostly financed by private multinationals managing water
resources.

The panel was directed by former International Monetary Fund
director Michel Camdessus, and last March, at the third World
Water Forum, it issued a report, titled Financing Water for All,
or the Camdessus Report, which openly advocates the "full cost
recovery" of private investment in water. "Full cost recovery"
means that governments in the poorest countries would guarantee
private investment in water infrastructure, either through
raising water tariffs, or by subsidies, in case users could not
pay high water prices.

On health issues, the G-8 plan of action to improve the access
of the poorest countries to medication has been ignored. A global
health crisis and critical situation has arisen due to a lack of
low-cost medicine in Africa, Latin America and Asia; and an
integrated framework to improve access to medical treatment and
medicine is desperately needed in the poorest countries.

Last year the WHO revealed that in the poor or less-developed
countries every year 4 million people die due to respiratory
infections, 2.2 million (cholera, typhus and dysentery), 1.7
million (tuberculosis), 1 million (malaria), 900,000 (blood-
related illnesses) and 3 million (AIDS). Clearly, the agenda in
the health sector should include the boosting of local medicine
production in the countries of the South, and the transfer of
technology from highly developed to developing countries.
However, the U.S. government rejected the move, which led to a
downgrading of the health issue at the G-8 meeting.

In short, it seems the health sector (or industry) only favors
those who can pay. As of 1997, the largest pharmaceutical markets
were developing countries -- the U.S. and Canada (36.1 percent of
the global market), Europe (29 percent), Japan (15.9 percent),
Latin America (7.7 percent), other Asian countries (7.3 percent),
the Middle East (1.9 percent), Africa (1.2 percent) and
Australia-Pacific (0.9 percent). In 1999, 26 million of 33
million people with AIDS were in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the
pharmaceutical market in Africa was only 1.3 percent of the world
total (Business Watch Indonesia, 2003).

This sad fact might be in line with the U.S. proposal for
health at the G-8 meeting, which underlined the "importance of a
powerful private sector role" in health questions and simply
dismissed the notion that the price of medication might be the
principal obstacle to health improvement. Thus, the new "Plan of
Action for Health" discussed by G-8, might fail, just as it did
three years ago. At that time the G-8 met at Okinawa, with
ambitious objectives to reduce the spread of AIDS. But since then
the number of AIDS victims has increased.

So as the world celebrates Environment Day we should ask
ourselves: Should we really run such businesses, whose profits
are accumulated at the cost of endangering millions of lives? Can
we really sacrifice our own grandchildren? Do we really want to
control not only our destiny but also others' -- especially those
who are powerless and poor and have thus become our dependents?

If the answer is still "yes", we shouldn't be surprised if
people blame us and we would all end in a brutal autumn at the
end of our lives.

The writer also lectures at the Sahid University in Surakarta,
Central Java.