In 1990 there were about 400 international environmental groups. Today, this number is more like 1.4 million.
So why is the world apparently in a worse state now? Have environmental groups paid too much attention to the wrong issues, countries and organisations?
The focus of the big international NGOs (BINGOs) has been frequently directed to economic development activities that are occurring in the newly industrialising countries, commonly in Asia.
But the well documented origin of many of the world’s major environmental problems is from the already developed countries in Europe and North America.
Witness last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – staggering in its ecological and social impact, yet hardly attracting any coordinated international protest from the three largest BINGOs – WWF, Nature Conservancy or Greenpeace.
There were only a few isolated petrol station protests in England by a small number of people from Greenpeace at the very last stages of the disaster.
Similarly, Goldman Sachs and other big investment banks have avoided BINGO attention amid the continuing global financial crisis – a calamity that caused millions of people to fall into poverty. Yet BINGOs have often attacked the financial history of firms in Asia.
Blockbusting consumerism in developed countries has not been pursued by any BINGO, but rather their attention has been on developing countries attempting to grow their economies out of poverty.
For example, BINGOs have relentlessly attacked the palm oil industry in Asia, an illustration of selective use of information and data to direct the market away from one of the world’s most challenged economies.
There is ample peer-reviewed research that is supportive of the palm oil industry in Indonesia. Greenpeace mounted a vigorous campaign against Nestle for using Indonesian palm oil, which resulted in Nestle dropping the use of the product and replacing it with alternative oil suppliers from developed nations.
The market benefit is shifted from Indonesia to a rich nation, and as palm oil-based products are tainted with a negative environmental narrative, there is a shift away from palm oil altogether.
After the Asian financial crisis a decade ago, the new Indonesian democratic government was encouraged by the World Bank and IMF to develop a palm oil industry because it is a large employer.
Rural employment was critical to Indonesia then, and remains so today. The population of Indonesia is approaching 240 million people with about 100 million of them living on less than US$2 per day.
By 2050, the population is expected to grow to 300 million. The country can expect to lose as much as 20% of its land mass with predicted rising sea levels in the coming decades.
Population issues are intense and will only become more critical over time. A key driver to uncontrolled population growth is poverty. Reducing poverty will reduce the rate of population growth.
Poverty is also a well-researched influence on environmental degradation. It would seem a ridiculous strategy for BINGOs to run campaigns that hold any nation in poverty and yet expect positive environmental and social outcomes.
The problem is that Indonesia is very good at growing palm oil, effectively shifting the economics of the world edible oil market. Palm oil is an incredibly productive crop, yielding substantially more oil per hectare than other oil-seed plants.
Palm oil also has the advantage of being a long-term plant – a palm oil tree will produce seeds for almost 70 years.
The long-term carbon sequestration opportunity of palm oil is well documented, compared to the negative carbon characteristics of other oil crops such as soya, corn or canola, which need to be stripped back to bare earth each harvest cycle.
These crops are grown mostly in Western or developed nations. Recent research describes these crops as environmenally unsustainable.
The demise of the palm oil industry in Asia is a human tragedy supported by Western-dominated BINGOs. Unless palm oil is being sourced from places like Indonesia, more land in Europe and North America will be cleared for soya, corn and or canola fields that are harvested using massive equipment employing very few people.
If BINGOs were serious about sustainability and communities they would be looking to help develop a sustainable palm oil industry, not maintain poverty.
The current mechanism is to invoke a free market, preventing poor countries from using tariffs to protect their infant industries.
This would mean developing countries become buyers of Western products, not producers and exporters of their own.
The activities of BINGOs will likely emerge as a new global trade protection mechanism by placing unbalanced environmental attention, and therefore barriers, on industrialising nations.
If companies like Goldman Sachs, BP or Union Carbide were Indonesian organisations, then BINGOs would have probably had a field day. But they are not.
Union Carbide is infamous for the chemical plant explosion in Bhopal, India where thousands Indian civilians were killed late on a the 3rd of December in 1984. The poisoned site is still closed today and there have been up to 300,000 people permanently maimed as a result of chemical poisoning.
Bhopal was the world’s largest civil court case and also without any doubts the worst environmental and continuing social catastrophe outside of any major war. The issue remains unresolved to the satisfaction of the victims.
The president emeritus of WWF in the US, the largest WWF branch, is Russel E Train. He was a board member of Union Carbide for more than 25 years.
Why haven’t Greenpeace or the Nature Conservancy ever pursued WWF on that? WWF is lucky it is not an Indonesian company.
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Comments (17)
Peter Wright
Policy advisor (logged in via email @zipworld.com.au)
This is a very poor piece of analysis. The author focuses on the palm oil example, and draws conclusions well challenged some of the other comments here. He then applies these conclusions to all work done by the BINGOs, arguing that they are neglecting the major environmental problems in the already developed countries.
I’d challenge this curious conclusion by citing the global campaign by WWF, Greenpeace and others on greenhouse gas reduction, which focuses strongly on emissions from developed…
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Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Peter,
You miss my point completely. I am asking a question. Why after so much activity by massive international NGOs with as many as 110,000 employees in one case and 5.5 million members in one organization alone around the world implementing programs similar you have outlined. Why are we in a worse environmental position today than 20 years ago? Surely that is a legitimate question to ask?
So if the world is in a worse environmental position, surely being a nation of free opinion the question…
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Paul Richards
Phillip, I appreciate your unique insight into the industry.
An area we all forget is levels of development all these parties work with in these countries. Corporations have a history of taking advantage of the political and social centre of gravity for profit, that's their purpose. We are all aware of numerous incidents in the last 12 months of this activity causing hardship. In this climate the BINGO suffer the same issues, but without organisational profit motives, deal with the same social…
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Tom Keen
BSc (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Professor Corey Bradshaw, from The University of Adelaide, has published a rebuttal to this article on his website:
http://conservationbytes.com/2011/09/12/you-should-shut-up/
Let's ignore the NGO distraction (regardless of the validity of statements about them in this article) and focus on what the world's experts are actually saying about this, based on their extensive research.
Ben Rawson
(Landscape Manager)
I don't work in Indonesia, however there are many issues in this article that simply do not ring true. It sounds like BINGOS are bringing the palm oil industry in Indonesia to its knees and thereby promoting poverty. It also intimate that palm oil is a great option for carbon sequestration. A few facts and figures a little work on the internet provided, mainly from a recent paper. Lin Pin Ko et al (2011). Remotely sensed evidence of tropical peatland conversion to oil palm. PNAS 108(12): 5127-5132…
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Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Ben, The point I am making, I think reasonably clearly is that 20 years of the current BINGO activity has really amounted to zero positive benefit, and its probably time to revisit the current strategy. If the effort translated to success then perhaps we should have seen some improvement in the global condition. The point is we haven't and so perhaps it time the activities of BINGOs could be questioned. As any organization should be questioned from time to time.
The Palm oil issue is complex and…
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Ben Rawson
(Landscape Manager)
Thanks Phillip. I think most people working on conservation BINGOs would dispute the point that there has been no net positive impact from their activities over the past 20 years. The issue is that economic development and population growth are runaway trains and the impacts we have are modest in comparison. We are going backwards, but not as slowly as we would without conservation interventions. For example, protected area coverage globally has increased to something like 12% of land cover across…
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Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Ben, I had the pleasure attending the Ban Ki Moon lecture at Sydney University yesterday. The Secretary General of the UN spoke about how since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the world's CO2 emissions have increased unabated to now alarming levels. I know we like to believe progress has been made and refer to various activities. But the evidence and truth is the CO2 in the earth's atmosphere has increased, so has BINGO activity. So it is a legitimate question to ask. Why isn't it working?
Ben Rawson
(Landscape Manager)
Ban Ki Moon is awesome. I think a better question is "what is working and how can we amplify these successes?" The reasons we are going backwards is because atmosphere and oceans are common property resources, and a large proprtion of other important systems are being managed by governments without the capacity or will to do so in a sustainable fashion.
Still, I think you are right that we should hold up the mirror once in a while. There is an intersting and clever paper just out in Biotropica by Eric Meijaard about exactly the issue you are discussing, looking at irony as a tool to better assess our approaches in implementing a Western conservation ethic in developing countries. Well worth a read and good grist for your ideological mill.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2011.00802.x/full
Let me know if you can't access and I can send it on to you.
Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Ben, Thanks for that. I'll follow up the paper. Sometimes its good to challenge the status quo.
Phillip
Shirley Birney
retiree (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)
Attributing blame to NGOs for pollutant industries chewing the butt out of Momma Nature in developed countries is patently absurd.
Rest assured that parliamentary enquiries into rogue industries in my region has been a result of NGOs blowing the whistle and the subsequent community outrage over industries running amok and polluting the environment with impunity. And without exception, parliamentary committees have found major failings in regulatory enforcement combined with irresponsible and…
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Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Shirley,
There areva couple of points I should develop a little further following your response.
Firstly, we should no assume all non-government groups are the same. The Yaziji and Dod, 2009 book "NGOs and Corporations" Cambridge, gives a wonderful description of the different levels of NGO from localized community, national and international bodies. Local and nation groups are focused in their efforts on immediate issues. Larger international groups can evolve into unaccountable political forces…
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Megan Evans
(logged in via Twitter)
What a bizarre article.
You make a number of unsupported assertions - e.g
"There is ample peer-reviewed research that is supportive of the palm oil industry in Indonesia."
Which research do you refer to?
I understand in principle the importance of considering the disproportional impact of Western lifestyles on the environment, but by pushing the "environment vs. people" dichotomy and accusing ENGOs of keeping people trapped in poverty is not only wrong, but overly simplistic and counterproductive.
I suggest this paper as a useful starting point: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2011.00802.x/abstract
Phillip Lawrence
(PhD Scholar at University of Sydney)
Thank you Megan for your comments.
I have seen the paper you cited, it covers a topic that has been discussed for a number of years but to date little actual money has changed from one country to another to support reduced deforestation, REDD. There is one REDD project in Indonesia and no others at all in Asia. Western countries are yet to come to the party. However, not everyone supports the concept as I am sure you are aware.
I suggest you look at "Palm oil: Addressing issues and towards…
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Sarah Smith
(logged in via Facebook)
The issues around the environment and those organisations mandated (self-appointed or government appointed) with protecting the environment is huge. I don't thin the writer is not presenting a blanket comment on all issues, how could he, but is merely raising a question for thought - when looking at the world at-large, especially BINGOs, is the pressure pointed in the right area? Does political, financial and other pressures impact these BINGOs? The big ones are run like companies, not just aligned…
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wilma western
(logged in via email @bigpond.com)
If Phillip's aim was to provoke responses perhaps some of the exaggerations in his article could be overlooked .While big NGOs do hold forth about the bad behaviour of multinationals in developed countries, the old campaigns , for example , outing of sloppy maintenance in nuclear generation plants ,or particle emissions against EPA rules don't seem to happen any more. It seems to be more dramatic ( and less hazardous as regards court cases etc?) to focus on easier 'targets' - such as clearing of…
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Kevin O'Neill
Specialist Representative (logged in via email @yahoo.com.au)
I thought the debate here was about destruction of rainforests for palm oil plantations and orangutan habitat in Borneo, yet this was not even mentioned in the article.