[Corporations] FW: The Global Greenwash Machine

[Mike Spears]

Tarzan, Indiana Jones and Conservation International's Global Greenwash
Machine

by Aziz Choudry

www.globalresearch.ca 5 November 2003

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/AZI311A.html
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Colin Powell says that its work is "amazing". In 2001, it received
what the media dubbed the biggest-ever grant to an environmental
organization - US $261 million spread over 10 years. Its website
proclaims: "A passionate few can make the difference in the world."

In interviews, its president, Russell Mittermeier, confesses to a
lifelong Tarzan fixation. Its vice-chair is the actor who played
Indiana Jones.

The organization is Conservation International (CI). Founded in 1987,
headquartered in Washington, DC, its stated mission is "to conserve
the Earth's living natural heritage, our global biodiversity, and to
demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with
nature." It operates in over thirty countries, in the Americas, Asia,
Africa and the Pacific.

But like Harrison Ford, it does a lot of acting, applying copious
layers of green make-up.

Perhaps CI draws inspiration from its Hollywood heroes. Remember how
the white actors got all the best lines, how the "natives" were not
quite human, frequently savage and dangerous, sometimes simply
incidental and irrelevant? Unfortunately, for many Indigenous Peoples
affected by CI's brand of "conservation", this is no movie set.

CI's interest in protecting "hotspots" of endangered biodiversity has
particular implications for many Indigenous Peoples who have endured
and resisted waves of colonial dispossession, genocide and ecocide,
including the appropriation of traditional knowledge and the flora
and fauna which they have protected for many generations.

It is no coincidence that Indigenous Peoples continue to live in the
world's remaining biodiverse regions. They are inextricably connected
to these ecosystems. However, CI frequently depicts them as threats
to the environment, accusing them of illegal logging, overpopulation
and slash-and-burn agriculture. Leave it to the experts to save these
places, says CI, through "applying innovations in science, economics,
policy and community participation to protect the Earth's richest
regions of plant and animal diversity in the hotspots, major tropical
wilderness areas and key marine ecosystems".

CI claims to work with local communities on conservation-based
alternatives to logging and other environmentally-destructive
activities - ecotourism and small enterprises to grow and market
coffee, exotic foods, chemicals and medicines from the rainforest.
Playing the role of an environmental NGO, CI participates in the
plunder of the global South.

Meanwhile, it willingly collaborates with, and fails to condemn, some
of the world's most ecologically destructive corporations and
institutions devastating the planet.

After all, CI's major supporters include Cemex, Citigroup, Chiquita,
Exxon Mobil Foundation, Ford, Gap, J P Morgan Chase and Co.,
McDonalds, Sony, Starbucks, United Airlines and Walt Disney. Gordon
Moore, the chair of CI's executive committee - and donor of the $261
million grant - founded Intel Corporation. CI claims that its
corporate supporters "know that their customers, shareholders and
employees share a common concern about protecting the environment."
The boards and committees of its various divisions read like a who's
who of big business.

CI uses its considerable financial resources, political influence and
environmental sweettalk to quietly access, administer and buy
biodiverse areas throughout the world and put them at the disposal of
transnational corporations.

Bioprospecting is a central plank of CI's operations. "Bioprospecting
by itself will not save the rainforest, but combined with other
activities, it will," said Marianne Guerin-McManus, CI's conservation
finance director. Really?

CI's track record suggests a motivation to conserve biodiversity as a
resource for bioprospecting for its private sector partners rather
than any concern for the rights of the peoples who have lived with,
and protected these ecosystems for so long.

Pharmaceutical companies want to access indigenous communities'
knowledge to find plants and traditional ways of using them because
this gives them a far higher chance to find potential pharmaceutical
products than random screening.

In 1997 CI signed a comprehensive bioprospecting agreement with
California-based company Hyseq, which specializes in genomic
sequencing. CI agreed to pre-screen drug candidates derived from
flora and fauna samples, and provide regular reports on its research
findings to Hyseq. As well as an initial contribution, Hyseq would
pay CI on a country basis, and an annual fee. Hyseq is free to pursue
intellectual property claims over any results.

In Panama, CI worked with Novartis, Monsanto, and others, in
"ecologically guided bioprospecting" - seeking pharmaceutical and
agricultural products from plants, fungi and insects. In Surinam it
cooperated with Bristol Myers Squibb, with its ethnobotanists
collecting plant samples. CI worked to win the trust of Indigenous
communities and healers and negotiate a very dubious
"benefit-sharing" agreement. Rural Advancement Foundation
International (RAFI - now the ETC Group) criticized the deal for the
paltry percentage (believed to be around 2-3% of any royalties)
offered to Indigenous communities, and said that it is unlikely that
the communities fully understood the implications before they
consented. The Surinam and Panama missions were part of the
US-government backed International Cooperative Biodioversity Group
program.

Half a world away, in Makira province in the Solomon Islands, CI runs
a project which sees local people harvesting the ngali nut, which
belongs to the canarium family. CI claims that this provides a viable
economic alternative to logging the country's tropical forests. This
project supplies the operations of an Australian entrepreneur, Peter
Hull. While owning a pharmacy in the Solomons' capital, Honiara in
the 1980s, he became interested in the health benefits of the
widely-consumed nut, noting the low incidence of arthritis among
Solomon Islanders.

On May 28 2002, Hull was granted a patent by the US Patent Office for
use of the nut oil in the "treatment of arthritis and other similar
conditions". He is applying for patents in 127 countries. He markets
a product, derived from the nut oil, called Arthrileaf. On his
website www.theapothecary.com, Hull says that he and CI work together
to convince village elders "that it is in their best interests to
preserve and protect their rain forest, in order to harvest the Ngali
nuts from it."

A July 2003 Edmonds Institute bulletin warns that the patent is so
broad that it could apply to other varieties of canarium grown in
other parts of the Pacific and Asia. While Arthrileaf can earn Hull
an estimated US $10,000 for each kilogram of nut oil, last year the
World Bank put per capita income in the Solomons at $570. It seems to
be another example of a CI collaboration which supports the rights of
private companies to cash in on traditional knowledge and patent
lifeforms. The locals - pardon the pun - get peanuts. Conservation
International's involvement in the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, is
deeply disturbing. Through a 1991 debt-for-nature swap, CI bought the
right to set up a genetic research station in the Monte Azules
Biosphere reserve in the Selva. CI is urging Mexico's government to
evict indigenous communities in Montes Azules, accusing them of
destroying the rainforest.

A June 2003 report by Chiapas-based Center for Political Analysis and
Social Investigation (CAPISE) dubbed CI a Trojan Horse of the US
government and transnational corporations. It revealed that CI's
program of flyovers - part of their USAID-supported "environmental
monitoring" program - flew over areas occupied by Zapatista
communities in planes which bore USAID markings. In Chiapas, CI uses
state-of-the art geographical information systems (GIS) technology,
including high-resolution satellite imaging. In the name of
environmental protection, it is pitting Indigenous communities
against each other, raising fears of conflict in an area which is
already heavily militarized by Mexico's army. In March 2003, Global
Exchange convened an emergency delegation to the area and found the
destruction most pronounced around military encampments, while
Indigenous villagers had outlawed slash-and-burn techniques and were
practicing sustainable organic agriculture. The giant Mexican
agribusiness/biotechnology corporation, Grupo Pulsar works closely
with CI in Mexico. Between 1996 and 2000 it donated US $10 million to
CI-Mexico. Pulsar's claimed concern for ecology and biodiversity does
not extend to its main activities which include the promotion of
monoculture in Chiapas, including the planned planting of 300,000
hectares of eucalypt trees. The Chiapas-based Centro de
Investigationes Economicas y Politicas de Accion Comunitaria (CIEPAC
- Center of Economic and Political Research for Community Action)
believes that "the Pulsar Group's 'donation' could more likely be a
remuneration (but free of taxes, since it's a donation) for services
lent by CI in bio-prospecting within the Selva Lacandona. Pulsar has
the technology, the resources and the business knowledge to know that
there are large rewards awaiting the 'discovery' of some medicinal
property extracted from samples from the Lacandona. CI "facilitates"
the Pulsar Group's entrance, it helps orient its technicians in the
prospecting, while at the same time pacifying local populations with
programs that promote the expansion of mono-crops around the Selva,
while projecting a conservation fagade to the world."

In many countries, the establishment of CI-initiated protected areas
have trampled on Indigenous Peoples' land, social, spiritual,
cultural, political and economic rights, without consultation, in
deals cut with governments and corporations in the name of
"conservation". The Wai Wai and Wapishana in southern Guyana recently
accused CI of "gross disrespect" towards Indigenous Peoples in moves
to set up a protected area on their territories.

Given the significant involvement of mining, oil and gas corporations
in CI's program it is sobering to note that many of its "biodiversity
hotspots" and project operations are on or adjacent to sites of oil,
gas and mineral exploration and extraction - Chiapas, Palawan
(Philippines), Colombia, West Papua, Aceh (Indonesia) and Papua New
Guinea, for example. Indigenous Peoples continue to resist the
corporate assaults on their territories, while CI actively champions
the causes of these companies to be seen as environmentally and
socially responsible.

In September 2002, mining giant Rio Tinto launched a partnership with
CI in southeastern Guinea's Pic De Fon, giving support for a rapid
assessment program of the rich biodiversity in a forest area in which
Rio Tinto was exploring (it has diamond and iron ore operations in
Guinea). Rio Tinto's environmental policy adviser Tom Burke sits on
the advisory board for CI's Center for Environmental Leadership in
Business (CELB), along with executives from International Paper,
Starbucks, and BP.

According to CI, the partnership in Guinea "addresses Rio Tinto's
business needs while furthering CI's conservation goals." The CELB is
a partnership between CI and the Ford Motor Company, and its
executive board is chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley, the Group
chief executive of BP.

CI's website boasts of its partnership for conservation with
Citigroup in Brazil, Peru, and South Africa. Rainforest Action
Network dubbed Citigroup "the Most Destructive Bank in the World"
precisely for its role in financing the destruction of old-growth
forests.

Another CI project is the Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI).
Convened by the CELB, participants include BP, ChevronTexaco,
Conservation International, Fauna & Flora International, Shell,
Smithsonian Institution, Statoil, The Nature Conservancy, and IUCN -
The World Conservation Union. This August, he EBI released a
collaborative report, "Energy and Biodiversity: Integrating
Biodiversity Conservation into Oil and Gas Development". The mind
boggles. CI is also a member of the industry-driven "Responding to
Climate Change" greenwash initiative (www.rtcc.org)

Given its corporate nature, and its "partnerships", it is easy to see
why CI is so uncritical about the impact of economic injustice on the
environment and biodiversity. Indeed it proposes market "solutions"
to address environmental destruction that has been caused or
exacerbated by freemarket capitalism. CI believes that the best way
to conserve biodiversity is to privatize it. In a recent In These
Times article, US journalist and writer Bill Weinberg sees this
approach leading to tropical forests becoming "corporate-administered
genetic colonies."

CI supports the World Bank-backed MesoAmerican Biological Corridor
project. Many indigenous communities, social movements and NGOs have
condemned this as an attempt to greenwash the massive Plan Puebla
Panama infrastructure scheme, and as a front for corporate biopiracy
in the region.

CI is also a partner in the Congo Basin Forest Partnership, with the
World Bank and the American Forest and Paper Association (US timber
and paper industry lobby group), launched by Colin Powell at last
year's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

In the struggles for social and ecological justice, and against
corporate colonialism, it is very clear which side Conservation
International is on. Not ours.

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  ) Copyright Aziz Choudry 2003  For fair use only/ pour usage
iquitable seulement .
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