Are corporations hog-tying conservation groups in CAFTA fight?

By Liza Grandia, et al

02 Jun 2005

Macaws and effect in Central America.

A year ago, President Bush signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Since then, the controversial plan has inspired protests across the U.S. and in Central America. And while past trade agreements have been ratified by Congress in less than two months, the Bush administration has delayed the vote on CAFTA multiple times, unable to rally the support needed for it to pass.

The latest vote is scheduled for this month, but CAFTA's passage is by no means inevitable. Many Democrats and some Republicans, having learned from the fallout of NAFTA -- for example, the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs -- are expected to vote against it. They're taking this stand because the agreement is weak on both labor and environmental standards, and because they are beginning to realize such treaties promote not free trade, but corporate trade.

The environmental movement has also learned from NAFTA. An impressive coalition of professional and grassroots organizations is fighting CAFTA on the basis that it "would allow foreign investors to challenge hard-won environmental laws and regulations, and fails to include adequate measures to ensure environmental improvement throughout Central America and the United States." Members include Friends of the Earth, Earthjustice, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, among others.

Missing from this fight is an elite subset of the movement: the international biodiversity conservation organizations. Not one of the four major groups in this field -- Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and the Wildlife Conservation Society -- has demonstrated the courage to oppose CAFTA, despite ample opportunity over the past year.

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When asked about his organization's position on CAFTA at a recent talk at the University of California-Berkeley, Kent Redford of WCS replied that his organization "does not engage in policy work." (The speech, offering an indication of priorities, was titled, "Has Poverty Alleviation Abducted Conservation?") Conservation International's vice president for conservation and government said, "We don't have a position." A World Wildlife Fund representative wrote, "WWF has not been tracing CAFTA either in Central America or in our U.S. office. As a result, we don't have a position on CAFTA ..." Nor has The Nature Conservancy stated a position.

Their silence is inexcusable. Consider the immediate threats CAFTA poses in a region that, while accounting for less than 1 percent of the world's land mass, is estimated to hold 8 to 10 percent of the planet's species:

The treaty would allow international agribusiness to dump subsidized food commodities, most notably corn, at below-market prices in Central America. When this happened in Mexico under NAFTA, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers lost their livelihoods. CAFTA may hasten agricultural price collapses, which would ultimately force small farmers off their land and -- as has happened in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve -- into protected areas in search of subsistence. CAFTA would effectively create a new underclass of displaced people: free-trade refugees.
It would enable corporations to sue governments over future lost profits if local environmental laws inhibit their activities. (This expands provisions in NAFTA that corporations have taken full advantage of; in perhaps the most famous, and still pending, case, Vancouver-based Methanex sued the U.S. government for $970 million over a California law that had banned the gasoline additive MTBE, a suspected carcinogen.) CAFTA would benefit companies like Harken Energy, which has long wanted to drill offshore in Costa Rica's protected Talamanca region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If CAFTA passes, Harken (on whose board George W. Bush formerly served) plans to sue the government of Costa Rica for $58 billion for the right to drill there. By comparison, the entire GDP of Costa Rica is $38 billion.
Most Central American countries currently prohibit the patenting of nature. But CAFTA would force them to modify their intellectual-property laws to enable corporate bio-prospecting (what many call bio-piracy), effectively allowing corporations to steal traditional indigenous knowledge. CAFTA would also facilitate the privatization of critical services like water, health, education, and telecommunications.
Although CAFTA does contain an "environmental" chapter, it merely makes recommendations like the "promotion" of clean production technologies. Corporate lobbyists hail CAFTA's voluntary mechanisms as the "most advanced ... ever included in a trade agreement." But as one Salvadoran environmental activist put it, "They have added a bit of green sweetener to a truly toxic stew."

In the face of these outrageous threats, how to explain the silence of these four groups, which are so well-endowed in budgets and policy staff?

We might look to an important paradigm shift. In the heady days after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, all of the major biodiversity groups embraced the concept of sustainable development. But over the past few years, the conservation pendulum has been swinging back to a stricter preservationist ideology. Little by little, the international conservation organizations have shifted to market-based approaches to conservation.

A decade after Rio, at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, these groups championed public-private partnerships. They also lauded the new reign of "ecosystem services," whereby any aspect of the environment can be had, for a price. It's not that the big organizations don't "do" policy; rather, they do only a certain kind of free-market policy work.

To facilitate the uptake of this free-market approach, international conservation groups have opened their doors to transnational corporate leaders. Today, three-quarters of Conservation International's board and half of the slots on The Nature Conservancy's board are given to representatives of major corporations -- including Wal-Mart and Gap, Inc., two companies actively lobbying in support of CAFTA. Are these corporate dollars a Faustian bargain for the international environmental movement? Are they subtly distracting these large conservation organizations from seeing the links between political economy and environmental degradation?

In these final critical weeks of debate, we need the lobbying support of the international conservationists working in Central America. Together, the four major groups control well over half of conservation dollars available worldwide, and wield enormous influence. Their partnerships with in-country organizations make them perfectly suited to lobby both on the ground and in Washington, D.C. They could give detailed testimony about CAFTA's impact on the regional environment. They could also lend support to the courageous Central Americans who have already spoken out vociferously against CAFTA.

Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Wildlife Conservation Society: it's time. We challenge you, with all your resources and your clout, to see beyond corporate interests. Join the many others in the environmental community who oppose this dangerous trade agreement.

Liza Grandia is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley and a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. Her coauthors are Laura Nader, Magalí Rey Rosa, Michael Dorsey, Jorge Cabrera, Carmelo Ruiz, and Jesse Colorado Swanhuyser.

Comments: (4 comments)

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More to be done...

In November/Dec 2004, World Watch published an intriguing article entitled "A Challenge to Conservationists." Its abstract is as follows:

"As corporate and government money flow into the three big international organizations that domiante the world's conservation agenda, their programs have been marked by clear conflicts of interest--and by a disturbing neglect of the indigenous peoples whose land they are in the business to protect."

(read it at http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/2004/176/)

The World Watch article specifically names World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and the Nature Conservancy; Grandia adds to that list of major conservation orgs the Wildlife Conservation Society. Still, the critiques in the World Watch article remain applicable.

If these same conservation organizations do NOT take a position on CAFTA--which threatens not only their conservation policy agendas, but the well-being of human rights, social, economic and environmental justice as well--it's difficult to see how they can duck charges of blatent conflicts of interest and downright elitism and racism with any kind of integrity. It's even more difficult to see how these groups can make common cause with working people and in communities of color. And in this day and age, these alliances are critical, both to creating political power and winning, and to the conservation movement's accountability to the people and communities who are affected by their work. (For more on this, check out Action Media's excellent analysis exploring who speaks for the environment: "Defining We," at http://www.actionmedia.org/Defining%20We.htm .) This, of course, is to say nothing of the vulnerability to the charge that conservation organizations value, say, spotted owls over people.

It seems this is exactly the kind of dynamic that the environmental justice movement has been fighting for some thirty years: elite, largely white middle and upper class group defines environment as soley "wilderness," and fail to take into account the environmental concerns of those who are not white, upper and middle class, Western, etc. It's frustrating to see that we have apparently not gotten farther than this...

by dandykins at 3:04 PM on 02 Jun 2005

Headline:Environmentalists attack Conservationists

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines an environmentalist as "one concerned about environmental quality especially of the human environment with respect to the control of pollution." This means that everyone is an environmentalist to one degree or another. Although the word is relatively new, people who act to limit pollution have been around for a long time. Ancient Rome's environmentalists built the first closed sewer system, the Cloaca Maxima

Then, there are those who are mostly interested in protecting wildlife. Usually called conservationists, this group includes, among others, hunters, trappers, and sport fishermen. Again, many of them have an immediate vested interest in preserving the environment for their own recreational uses.

People interested in preserving the planet's biodiversity for its own sake need a unique name to differentiate themselves from the generic environmentalists and the conservationists. I'd like to propose one and call this subgroup, biodiversity preservationists, or even better, biodiversivists. The big four conservation groups would be more accurately described as biodiversity preservation groups.

The big four all have the same focus--to protect natural habitat by the act of preservation. This is done in any number of ways, for example, buying the land, leasing the land, and especially by convincing governments to create protected preserves.

This last method takes a great deal of diplomacy. A government intent on raising the standard of living for its citizens may view the CETA in a favorable light, rightly or wrongly.

From the Trade Resource Center
( http://trade.businessroundtable.org/trade_2005/cafta_dr/environment.html ):

Central America is a region with astounding biodiversity and important world ecosystems. It also is a region suffering from severe poverty and significant environment and public health problems. One important step to improving protection of the environment in Central America is poverty reduction through increased economic growth. Countries with higher national incomes tend to have stronger environmental protections and lower rates of pollution. Liberalized trade through DRCAFTA will produce more and better paying jobs in Central America -- and that prosperity will make it possible for the region to improve environmental protection.

Biodiversivists realize that facilitating the urbanization of ever-growing populations of slash and burn subsistence farmers and pastoralists by providing meaningful jobs is a key to saving habitat in the long run. The combination of urbanization and poverty reduction is by far the best win/win combination for preserving biodiversity. This proven strategy is at odds with the vision many environmental activists share of a solar powered world filled with 9 billion or so hemp wearing, bike riding, organic farmers (which coincidentally also describes the lifestyles of roughly two billion Chinese and Indian peasants). The popular environmentalist strategy of the day is to rail against free trade agreements while fantasizing that the indigenous people of the world have stable populations and live in harmony with their natural environments. Neither is true. The lion's share of population growth is in impoverished third world nations. Slash and burn pastoralists live hard, unpredictable, short lives and their way of living makes New Yorkers look green.

I would hope that the big four will to stick to their guns and continue to do what they do best. The Ivory Billed woodpecker survives to this day because of them. They have been making great strides in the past few years. Their role in this struggle is to preserve what remains. The environmentalist's role is to make cities into healthy places for people to live. It is up to "properly regulated" free markets to give those people economic opportunities in those cities.

Everyone has a role to play. Let everyone do what they do best. Environmentalists and biodiversivists are notoriously ineffectual at creating economic opportunity and free trade enthusiasts are not very good at protecting the environment or our biodiversity.

Lizard with blue lips

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 9:56 PM on 02 Jun 2005

International Trade Is Bad For All Species

Biodiversivist is dead wrong about international trade. Its harms include consumption and burning of oil, water pollution from ships, so much noise from those montrous freighters that the whales can no longer hear each other over long distances, and spread of non-native species. Most of these things are causes of some of the greatest ecological problems we face. We should be aiming for everything to be bought and sold locally, which it certainly can be.

Jeff Hoffman

by jdhlax at 1:01 AM on 04 Jun 2005

WWF muffled in DC?

Writing from cloudy Brussels, I find particularly strange the comment made by a WWF/US rep - "WWF has not been tracing CAFTA either in Central America or in our U.S. office. As a result, we don't have a position on CAFTA ..."

Over here, WWF International's European Policy Office has a vigorous and influential line on trade and the environment. Maybe the WWF trade folks in Brussels should jump an Airbus to DC and get their better-paid American "cousins" to start tracing and thinking about CAFTA and more on the trade agenda.

by acrossthepond at 9:05 AM on 15 Jun 2005

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Silence Is Beholden

Are corporations hog-tying conservation groups in CAFTA fight?