Johannesburg World Summit Company CEO Moss Mashishi looks at the role of business
The intimate involvement of business and industry with the Earth summit process is more than a decade old.
In 1992 the secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), millionaire Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong, identified business and industry as both “the principal instrument of economic growth” and “the prime instrument of environmental and social change”.
Recognised as a major stakeholder group by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, set up after the first Earth summit, this sector has participated in the commission’s deliberations on sustainable development since then.
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) since 1919 the channel through which the business community had reached global policymakers had been actively involved in the UNCED preparatory process, and has developed a Business Charter for Sustainable Development, which remains the standard code for business.
The ICC’s cornerstone was, and still is, support for free enterprise. During the drafting of Agenda 21, in which it had a hand, it argued that a market-oriented approach was the basis for allocating resources efficiently.
Early in the Rio preparatory process Strong appointed Swiss businessman Stephan Schmidheiny (of Swatch watches and other concerns) as his principal adviser for business and industry.
Schmidheiny set up “a blue-ribbon council of 50 major industrialists from all over the world” the Business Council for Sustainable Development, today called the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
The ICC and Business Council for Sustainable Development distributed book-length reports at UNCED. The ICC’s From Ideas to Action Business and Sustainable Development, defines sustainable development as “[putting] our way of life on a foundation that is based on generating income, not drawing from assets”.
From Ideas to Action suggested a redirection of policies: “Economic growth in all parts of the world is essential to improve the livelihoods of the poor, to sustain growing populations, and eventually to stabilise population levels. New technologies will be needed to permit growth while using energy and other resources more efficiently and producing less pollution.
“Open and competitive markets, both within and between nations, foster innovation and efficiency and provide opportunities for all to improve their living conditions. But such markets must give the right signals; the prices of goods and services must increasingly recognise and reflect the environmental costs of their production, use, recycling, and disposal.
“This is fundamental, and is best achieved by a synthesis of economic instruments designed to correct distortions and encourage innovation and continuous improvement, regulatory standards to direct performance, and voluntary initiatives by the private sector.”
Important as they are, those initiatives are but one pillar on which to build sustainable development. In 1992 From Ideas to Action noted that “unless the developing nations are put on a sustainable growth path at the same time, their problems will affect all parts of the world, and the business community as well”.
The ICC book also contains the chamber’s Business Charter for Sustainable Development, which had been adopted “to demonstrate to governments and society that business is taking its environmental sensibilities seriously by helping to reduce the pressures on governments to over-legislate, thereby strengthening the voice of business in policy debates”.
The Business Council for Sustainable Development, on which Pick ‘n Pay’s Raymond Ackerman was the lone South African member, was mandated by UNCED to provide a business perspective on the achievement of sustainable development; to encourage business to examine its own environmental performance; to develop sustainable development goals and practices for business to pursue; and to “stimulate analysis and discussion on public policies that concern business”.
Despite the logic behind Strong’s desire to bring industry on board, he was blasted by greens who felt the relationship between environmentalists and big business was better left at “us versus them”.
Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable development into the 21st century that was endorsed at Rio, included business and industry among key social groups whose role and rights in sustainable development must be strengthened.
But many greens preferred private enterprise to be seen as an entity whose activities should be regulated. Highly critical of the Business Council, NGO Greenpeace said it was mainly concerned with new markets in developing countries.
Why should we hope that the Johannesburg world summit process may achieve what Rio didn’t in terms of business adding impetus to the quest to address poverty alleviation through concrete, sustainable action?
Laurraine Lotter, executive director of the Chemical and Allied Industries Association and co-author of the draft business plan of South Africa’s Business Coordinating Forum for the Johannesburg world summit, offers the following perspective: “The overarching theme of the summit is poverty, environment and development. The choice of this theme has important implications for the developing world.
“By implicitly recognising the interconnectedness of poverty, environment and development, the summit enables a widening of the debate from the environment per se to the more macroeconomic causes of poverty such as debt, terms of trade and inadequate financial flows from North to South.”
The theme reflects a growing recognition of the impact of poverty and environmental degradation on the health, security and prosperity of the North, she says. Issues such as environmental refugees, environment as a cause of conflict, the spread of environmental health problems and the deterioration of the global green zones are all receiving increasing attention for this reason.
“The world summit is coming at a time when both the North and the South are reassessing approaches to addressing the intersections between poverty, environment and development. As such, the summit offers a unique opportunity to negotiate a new global compact in which significant commitments are made to fundamentally address the causes of poverty and a deteriorating global environment.”