Why the UN Has Been Such a Failure

The UN’s main man on the environment, Achim Steiner, has just provided monumentally bad advice to government policy makers.

Speaking in Cairo on 4 March at the opening of the biennial African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, Steiner asserted that the “only insurance against climate change impacts is ambitious global mitigation action” combined “with large-scale, rapidly increasing and predictable funding for adaptation.”

If anything is clear from the UN’s 45-year record of trying to deal with the problems of the human environment, it is that “mitigation action” is completely useless unless we deal with the destructive economic forces driving a multifaceted global crisis.

The UN has been unable to say so because the major industrial countries are in thrall to mega corporations that profit hugely from ignoring environmental concerns.

They ensured UN inaction by putting a Canadian oilman in charge of the first World Conference on the Environment (Stockholm, 1972), and making him the first head of the new Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Under his direction UNEP studied problems and identified causes but never ever hinted at the need for wholesale redirection of the world economy, the only thing that can stop our slide to disaster.

UNEP's stock in trade became international agreements to deal with negative impacts.

Meanwhile, another part of the UN that did try to negotiate a Code of Conduct for corporations was quietly wound up.

This lack of cojones is not just on environmental matters.

Even more glaring is the example of the UN Security Council, which has never been able to undertake its primary task of disarming the world and building a global security system because its five veto-wielding “Permanent Members” are the world’s largest arms producers and their elites profit hugely from war.

Less known but even more venal is the organization’s failure to deal with the enormously violent crime wave that has washed around the world since the 1960s.

Analyses show that drug trafficking has been its primary driver and that it now funds all other forms of organized crime, including “Islamic terrorism.”

But the UN has pussy-footed around the matter because Britain’s primary industry, banking, is neck-deep in laundering drug money.

None of this is secret. Books and expert analyses provide the sordid details in ample measure.

But getting from expert analyses to public policy has been impossible because the Cold War empowered a fascist apparatus in major countries that constrains politicians and the Press even in the freest of societies.

Revealing detail: The New Yorker, as genteel a publication as ever graced the rough and ready world of journalism, now has an encrypted system to receive material from whistle blowers.

Activist Manifesto for Rio+20

Environmental activists going to the "Rio+20" Conference in Brazil next June  should use it for two things primarily: to springboard civil society action aimed at bringing about global change, and to reject the governmental agenda.

The reason for rejecting governmental proposals is simple: for four decades official action has been ineffective.

The world today is far more polluted than it was in 1972 when the UN convened the first world conference on the environment. Numerous new problems have surfaced, ranging from the accelerating extinction of species to global warming, and there is a grim pall over every environmental prospect we can see or imagine.

The basic problem with the governmental approach is that it is inadequate. Improved environmental standards and controls cannot "green" the world economy as it tries to cater to six billion poor people hoping to become "developed" and live like the rich. The belief that new technologies can make much difference in this scenario is little more than fervent corporate faith.

Governmental action has been constrained by the fear of damaging the wealth-creating capacity of the existing economic system. Big corporations, which fear radical change because they inevitably reduce profits, have been the primary promoters of caution.

So what can environmental activists do at Rio+20 to change this situation?

They should adopt their own plan of action and begin implementing it with or without the support of governments. (Governmental support is a certainty once power brokers see that they will be cut out of the action if they do not participate.)

The Plan of Action should consist of the following steps:

1. Network: Activists should create a global electronic network arranged in an easily accessible hierarchy (local, national, regional, global), to facilitate sharing of information, interactive discussion, and concerted action.

2. Organize: Activists should work with entrepreneurs and leaders of small business to establish community-level organizations for cooperative action. (This will be good for business, so gaining entrepreneurial support should not be difficult.) As these units develop and proliferate they should become the basic units of the global network.

3. Survey & Monitor: Using the network to share the best available expertise (including that of the UN Environment Programme), activists should begin a global environmental survey based on community-level feedback. It should put in place a permanent environmental monitoring system capable of providing real time status reports for consideration by governments at the national, regional and global levels

4. Analyze: Analysis of the data collected by the Survey should indicate the need for remedial and preventive actions, their scope and cost. In contrast to existing analyses, those generated by activist networks can be expected to pull no punches in identifying what needs to change, and where.

5. Educate & Mobilize: The community level organizations and their networks should be engaged in educating and mobilizing popular support for environmental action.

 Energetic implementation of these steps should create a global apparatus for effective action from the local to global levels. It should also create the general public awareness and support for continuing action.

Land Acquisition With Vision

Acquiring farmland for non-agricultural purposes is not just a matter of changing ownership; it has to do with the nature of Indian society and must be addressed with vision.

Judging from news reports, the new draft of the Land Acquisition Bill prepared by Jairam Ramesh the new Minister for Rural Development will focus purely on logistics. Acquisition of farmland will require approval by 80 percent of owners in an area, and there will be an effort to ensure payment of a fair price.

But the Bill is without vision. It does not address two critical issues.

One is the future of those displaced by non-agricultural uses of the land. Will they, like so many before, be temporarily rich and then sink into poverty? Or will they go on to enriching and productive lives?

The second issue is the fate of the land itself: will the new owners treat it with the necessary respect and care?

I would like to suggest to Mr. Ramesh that the Land Acquisition Bill address these two issues within the framework of his former responsibilities to safeguard the country’s natural environment.

Specifically, the Land Acquisition Bill should contain two provisions:

1) To build into the transfer pricing a component that will ensure ongoing support for the education and training of the first generation of displaced people and their children. An effort should be made to maintain the connection to the land these people have had for many generations.

2) To facilitate the training of some of the displaced farmers to be paid Monitors of the lands transferred to other uses. The new owners of the land would fund this monitoring through a system of maintenance fees built into transfer agreements.

To be fully effective, these arrangements should go hand in hand with the development of a national Environmental Monitoring Service charged with maintaining a continuously updated Web-based reporting system, with a consolidated Annual Report to parliament. 

Midsummer Madness at the UN

Over the last decade an estimated 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts and 6 million left disabled. Around 300,000 children now serve as soldiers. Little girls fare the worst. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, reported last month that "sexual violence is becoming systemic and across the world, classrooms and the kids sitting in them are increasingly seen as legitimate targets."

As the main UN organ responsible for maintaining international peace and security, the UN Security Council has had this matter formally on its agenda since 1999. What has it done about the situation? It has established a "name and shame" list of groups using child soldiers and actively victimizing children. Those who abduct, abuse and brutalize children in order to use them as killers are supposed to be "shamed" by having their groups named in a UN document. The Council met last week to expand the list. Other choice bits of UN madness include the following: Disarmament Conference: On 1 July, Ambassador So Se Pyong of North Korea took over the rotating chairmanship of the Geneva-based Disarmament Conference, the world's only multilateral body to negotiate arms control. Most countries ignored the absurdity of the situation but the Canadians, earnest as ever, declared they would boycott the body till his six month term is over. ECOSOC: July is when the world's diplomats gather for the annual meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the main coordinating organ of the UN System. It is when the world is hit with a ton of new reports, estimates and projections. Among the notable (if not entirely laudable) efforts this year are the following: World Economic Survey: Produced by the central secretariat of the UN in New York, this 280-page report calls for the greening of the world economy at the cost of $72 trillion over the next 40 years. This is a pipedream; the total GDP of the United States is $14.6 trillion. Millennium Development Goals: A 72-page report from the UN tells about progress towards the goal (set by world leaders in 2000), of halving world poverty by 2015. China and India have made significant progress because of their rapid economic growth. The report projects China to have only 5 percent of its 1.4 billion people living in poverty in 2015. India, with a matching population, will have 22 percent below the poverty line then; it used to be 51 per cent in 1990. Sub-Saharan Africa has made very slow progress; 58 percent of its people lived in poverty in 1990; by 2005 that had fallen only to 51 per cent. If the world economy should sink into the cataclysmic crisis that now seems to be building in the financial systems of Europe and China, all projections will have to be radically recalculated. African Development: The UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), note that Africa accounts only for 1 per cent of global manufacturing and recommend increasing that share. As is historically true of UN reports, UNIDO and UNCTAD do not look at any of the real reasons for Africa’s miserable economic performance – instability, war and corruption, all part of the continued and scandalous neo-colonial exploitation of the continent.

UN Reform: Efforts to improve the performance of the United Nations were briefly energized after the Obama administration signalled its intention to seriously engage in multilateral diplomacy, but they are now back to normal. As in a Noh drama, the action is glue-like, the plot incomprehensible, and the whole thing of interest only to afficianados. There is need for a radical change of focus and approach, but UN member States are so reluctant to give up the devil they know that it is impossible to entertain the slightest hope of real change. (For what is necessary to bring about real UN reform see my Discussion Paper; this is a topic on which we need to get a global conversation going.)

Saving the World at Earth Summit 2012 (Part 2)

If the “Earth Summit” convened by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 is to save the world from sliding into certain environmental disaster, it must address the rapacious ecological impact of giant corporations.

How to do that when corporations control the world economy and have enormous influence on the policies of governments?

To know what must be done we have to understand how corporations got so big and powerful – and why they are so vulnerable now to citizen action.

The joint stock corporations which now control world markets have only been around since the 17th century. The first of them was the East India Company, which was formed by a number of rich merchants in London and given a monopoly of the India trade by Queen Elizabeth. Soon other countries in Europe followed suit, and that first generation of corporations laid the foundations of a global economy.

They established colonies in Asia and the Americas, and the transatlantic slave trade out of Africa. They brought indentured workers from Asia to the Americas and Africa. They created a global trade in sugar, opium, tea, calico and silk. In the 18th century they also became the main vehicles for the industrial and technological revolutions in Europe.

In doing all this, corporations with the most resources had a natural advantage, and as smaller competitors fell by the wayside, the survivors became ever bigger. To manage their giant budgets and processes they needed huge bureaucracies with top-down systems of command and control. Such systems could not cope with volatility, so corporations sought to create stable economic and social conditions.

They did that in several ways. One was by getting involved in politics and ensuring business-friendly legislation. Another was through advertising (an industry pioneered by corporations to shape the social atitudes underlying mass demand). Perhaps the most important avenue of influence was the mass media, control of which came to be concentrated in a very few mega-corporations.

As long as the Cold War was in progress, many developing countries were suspicious of corporate power and did not allow them free entry into their economies. Such resistance ended in the 1990s, and as developing countries clamoured for corporate investments, it accelerated economic globalization. The trade patterns that emerged were insane. Investments flowed mainly to a handful of countries in East and South-East Asia where corporations could make the most profit. China became the “workshop of the world,” producing all matter of goods, including cheap plastic toys, and shipping them around the world.

This was of course, hugely wasteful of energy, for many commodities, including petroleum, had to be shipped in bulk to China to enable the reverse flow of manufactures. There was a dramtic growth of environmental pollution. Scientists noticed a "brown cloud" over all of Asia, a poisonous mix of chemicals, eroded top-soil and sand blown from rapidly expanding deserts. In the middle of the Pacific there grew a floating island of garbage, mainly discarded plastic items, as large as the continental United States.

How can the Earth Summit in 2012 change this awful reality?

It must base its action on three realities.


The first is the nature of the problem. Corporations are the principal cause of environmental degradation.

The second is that corporations create most of the wealth in the world; thus, any effort at change must be evolutionary and result in a reorientation rather than a destruction of corporate capacities.

The third reality is the irrelevance of factors that made mega corporations necessary and efficient in the heyday of heavy industrialization. The information and communications revolutions have made networks much more efficient than hierarchical bureaucracies.

What is the strategy for action that the Earth Summit must construct on these realities? That will be in the next post. Stay tuned.

Can 2012 Earth Summit Save The World? (Part 1)

[News: The UN General Assembly has called for a new "Earth Summit" in 2012.]

Five decades after biologist Rachel Carson’s best-selling book “Silent Spring” rang the alarm about environmental pollution, world leaders will gather for the fourth time to deal with the rapidly worsening problem.

Their previous meetings achieved limited but important goals; in 2012 they have an opportunity – if they think big – to reverse the trend and save the world form certain environmental disaster.

What exactly does thinking big mean?

It is best explained by looking at the previous three meetings.

The first UN Environment Conference in 1972 (Stockholm), put the issue on the world’s political agenda. It led to the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro agreed on a voluminous action programme. Dubbed Agenda 21, it acknowledged the magnitude of problems affecting the planet’s eco-system and identified “major groups” that should be activated to take remedial action.

The 2002 “Rio+10” conference at Johannesburg elaborated on the implementation of Agenda 21.

At all three meetings, the focus was heavily on symptoms. The conferences identified specific problems – climate change, loss of bio-diversity, deforestation etc. – and initiated separate courses of action to deal with them. The core issue of why so much bad stuff was happening was dealt with only tangentially, with blame apportioned mainly to "unsustainable" patterns of production and consumption. That approach was like that of a physician prescribing symptomatic treatment for a patient suffering from cancer.

As a result, the implementation of Agenda 21 quickly lost focus and energy. Problems have been worsening rapidly as billions of people seek to “develop” by joining industrialized countries in an ever more global economy.

To remedy the situation the 2012 meeting must consider root causes. If governments will not do it, civil society must undertake the task. In either case, implementation will depend heavily on citizen action.

Even a cursory review of historical trends will show that all the most serious problems are rooted in the nature of industrial civilization. Two factors about it are especially problematic.

The first is enormity of scale (yes, size has a moral dimension). The environmental impact of a local population using wood from a forest is quite different from a corporation selling it to a global market. One harvests to meet a need, the other devastates for profit. 

The second factor is that the central institution of industrial civilization, the commercial corporation, is blind to moral, aesthetic and natural claims unrelated to its profit. The wilful nature of that blindness is indicated by the monumental flop of the Global Compact, a UN initiative to have corporations pledge to uphold certain minimum human rights and environmental standards. Only some five thousand corporations have joined the Compact, many of them small and medium enterprises. The mega corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenues, of which there now over 60,000, have stayed away in droves.

How do we address these two problems? I’ll deal with that in my next post. Those impatient to know what I suggest can get part of the answer by reading the article on Gandhi at my web site (scroll down to Essay 1 under the title Hind Swaraj II).