The logging industry is coming under fire for its practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo and may be prevented from expanding operations in the area. This is due to rural communities in the Congo allegedly being duped by logging companies into selling off their indigenous forest for some bags of sugar and salt, according to a report by The Guardian newspaper on April 11. The villagers rely on the forests for their livelihoods and the deals often only cost the logging companies around £10,000, when, in fact, one tree can be sold for as much as £4,000 in Europe.
Also in April, Greenpeace released a report – Carving Up the Congo – which exposes how multinational logging firms are operating in the Congo and how, even though many of the deals are sanctioned and supported by the World Bank as corporate responsibility practices, these deals have gone out of control with 15m hectares of rainforest granted to the logging industry despite a moratorium put in place in 2002. The report calls for regulation of the industry in the DRC as well as the development of policies and an overhaul of governance.
The news of the exploitative actions of multinational logging companies in the Congo is disturbing on a number of levels. Not only are local villagers being deprived of their livelihoods, the wider environmental impacts are tremendous.
A new report by report the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme claims that one days’ deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying to New York. It seems that tackling climate change could be achieved more quickly – and more cheaply – by halting the destruction of the rainforests in the Congo and elsewhere.
Companies not backing up sustainability commitments
A survey conducted by A.T. Kearney and the Institute for Supply Management showed that barely half of the companies involved were able to back up their sustainability claims.
The survey was conducted in order to understand how sustainability is impacting businesses and business links, but the results showed that only 36% of companies have formal strategies that reach down into their supply chains.
Daniel Mahler, leader of the Sustainability Study at A.T. Kearny said in the report that “Supply management organizations have to support the corporate sustainability strategy…They are the ‘litmus test’ of the commitment.”
Voluntary initiatives such as the Ethical Trading Initiative are insufficient for improving the lives of children because companies consistently violate the codes and are not enforced.
Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Failing Children, which was published by the Corporate Responsibility Coalition at the end of March, looked at three voluntary programmes: International Marketing Code for Breastmilk Substitutes, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Ethical trading Initiative and found that:
1.4m children are still dying annually because they have not been breastfed adequately and that the aggressive marketing of substitutes is common worldwide.
Almost no companies involved in the oil, gas and mining sector, where the EITI is active, are fully transparent about payments that fuel conflict and cause poverty, factors which contribute to the death and displacement of 20m people.
Key aspects of the ETI, which was set up to protect workers’ rights, are ignored and that 12.3m children are employed in export industries that support multinational companies.
The report calls for the following:
Enforcement of the codes and penalising companies who sign up but fail to meet the aims
Labour or transparency laws promoted by government at a national level
Company law to force companies to adhere to codes wherever they are operating globally
Governments and companies to implement international measures that can reinforce codes of conduct, such as the UN Human Rights Norms for Business and the OECD guidelines on Multinational Enterprise.
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