UN Plan To Save Earth Is “Fig Leaf” For Big Business: Insiders

September 12th, 2015

Awake Goy

The GBA is a global business network set-up specifically to represent “global, regional, national and sectoral business organisations and associations” at the UN’s SDG process, “as well as companies from multinational corporations… from all geographic regions.”

It describes itself as “having a shared vision that market-based solutions are essential to move toward a more sustainable and equitable world.” At the UN, the alliance works “to ensure that private sector messages will resonate positively and coherently.”

The GBA represents global and regional business associations across key industries in the financial, mining, agricultural, fertiliser, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, and transport sectors.

The alliance’s mission can be discerned from a GBA statement in January made at the SDG Stakeholder Preparatory Forum at the UN Headquarters in New York.

While noting that business “enthusiastically welcomes” the sustainable development agenda, the GBA declared that its main priority is to create “policy environments” in poor countries “that are conducive to both domestic and international private finance.”

By re-structuring poorer economies to “mobilise and attract domestic and international investment”, the GBA claimed, they can build the “infrastructure necessary to spur inclusive economic growth.”

The problem is that this business-centric vision of “inclusive economic growth” is barely different from the failed neoliberal paradigm of market fundamentalism, which critics say has widened inequalities and accelerated debt.

Despite claims that the UN’s previous Millennium Development Goals (MDG) have succeeded in halving global poverty since the 1990s, there is good reason to question this narrative.

Today, 4.3 billion people live on less than $5 a day. Although higher than the World Bank poverty measure at $1.25 a day, the development charity ActionAid showed in a 2013 report that a more realistic poverty measure would be under $10 a day.

Yet far from decreasing, since 1990 the number of people living under $10 a day has increased by 25%. Global poverty has not reduced — it’s got worse.

According to Dr. Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics, this is not surprising because the “claim that growth can eradicate poverty is not scientifically robust.” Hickel told me that this might “sound reasonable if you believe in trickle-down economics” — as do most conventional economists — “but the past forty years have delivered precious little evidence for this paradigm. The only way that the SDGs can claim that growth will eradicate poverty is by pushing the poverty line and the hunger line to incredibly low levels… lower than humans can actually survive on.”

I asked Hickel why, despite so much internal criticism from UN stakeholders within the SDG process itself, these concerns had not impacted on the text of the SDG ‘Zero Draft.’ “In an early version of the Zero Draft, there was a commitment to replace GDP with an alternative measure of economic well-being. But somehow that disappeared from the final text,” said Hickel. “I don’t know what happened behind the scenes.”

He refers to an account from someone working with the Brussels-based CIDSE (International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity), a network of 17 Catholic development agencies based in Europe and North America, “who had been involved with the negotiations on the Zero Draft…

“She told me that the process was highly compromised, and she quit in disgust — but she told me she was not allowed to share details about what she knew.”

Excluding civil society

This allegation is borne out by UN records, which show that its own Major Groups representing the very people the global institution professes to be empowering — poor people in developing countries — are increasingly sceptical of the SDG agenda.

A scathing joint civil society statement to the UN early last month expressed “alarm” at “the extraordinary level of confidence that governments are placing in the private sector to finance and implement the Post- 2015 Development Agenda.”

While the GBA’s UN submissions consistently blamed corrupt governments and legal frameworks in poor countries for lack of investment, the UN Major Group for Civil Society pointed out that the real obstacle is tax avoidance by foreign investors and corporate contempt for human rights:

“The notion that we need to unlock the potential of the private sector is fundamentally contradicted by the trillions of dollars currently leaving developing countries through corporate tax evasion and other illicit financial flows. Added to this is a general lack of accountability despite prolific evidence of systemic human rights abuses perpetrated by corporations that undermine development efforts.”

The civil society statement also points to parallel efforts by Western governments to forge new ‘free-trade’ agreements, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) along with proposed Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses.

These new trade and investment frameworks are being negotiated by governments in secret without public accountability. The UN’s civil society group notes that the ISDS clauses “empower corporations to sue governments for reducing the value of investments through regulations that promote human rights, the environment, and labor standards.”

Yet the SDGs offer little to protect vulnerable communities in the face of such corporate encroachment.

Instead, as the UN’s civil society group observes, the SDG process is ignoring “growing evidence that privatisation of essential social services exacerbates inequalities in access and marginalises the poorest.”

A further civil society statement to the UN on the Means of Implementation of the SDG agenda in late July criticised the process for “failing to address” structural and institutional “barriers to people-centred development rooted in an unjust global economic system.”

Such barriers, the NGOs declared, include a global “corporate rights regime” including the creation of “tools to sue governments when public policy threatens profits”; lack of “binding mechanisms to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses”; “austerity and debt servicing measures, which starve public coffers and restrict public spending on social services and infrastructure”; and the “failure to allocate public resources to the public services and public goods required for healthy and sustainable communities.” In summary, the statement warned:

“The emphasis on private financing and the role of transnational corporations, will further weaken public policy space [for] governments and fails to address the unfinished business of regulating the financial sector despite the extreme and intergenerational poverty created by the global crisis.”

Excluding indigenous people

Other statements from UN stakeholders were equally damning.

On 25th March, the Indigenous Peoples Working Group told a Major Group dialogue hosted by the Trusteeship Council Chamber at UN headquarters that the SDG process “is in jeopardy of excluding Indigenous Peoples from the agenda.”

Both the SDG’s targets and the UN Statistical Commission’s critical review of the targets fail to recognise “the distinct cultural identities and political status of Indigenous Peoples who are rights-holders and agents of change.”

Excluding the labour force

The Major Group for Workers and Trade Unions similarly delivered a statement to the UN as part of the Post-2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations highlighting serious limitations to the proposed indicators to measure progress on attaining SDG targets, especially in addressing education, the right to water, democratisation of work-places, wage disparities, trade unions, and excessive privatisation.

“The proposal focuses on outcome indicators at the expense of structure and process indicators. We want to see more indicators that assess the legal and institutional reforms which are key for sustainable and long-term change.”

The SDGs make no clear reference to the human right to water, for example, effectively providing “an open door for turning water into a commodity.”

The UN workers group particularly opposes the emphasis on public-private partnerships, which it describes as “an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and services, since they conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies.”

The group concludes to the contrary that: “Public investment in the provision of health, education, social services and water and energy utilities should be encouraged, instead of selling off public assets.”

Excluding children

According to the UN Major Group for Children and Youth, the SDG’s focus on cultivating more “growth, industrialisation and urbanisation” fails to account for “ecological footprints as compared to planetary boundaries.”

In their March statement at the UN, the group echoed the criticism from the UN Major Group for Workers regarding the omission of the right to water:

“… why was the term ‘human right to water and sanitation’ not included as an amendment for technical proofing, in spite of it being agreed in a General Assembly resolution 64/292? We notice inconsistencies in the type of reasoning for altering the targets. This is a dangerous precedent and any regression is not acceptable.”

The group also remarked that SDG targets on inequality and health were vague and insufficient. Without “caps on maximum and incomes and specific ratios between the top and bottom quintiles”, the inequality targets would not be impactful. The weakness of the health target was highlighted, especially in ignoring antimicrobial resistance.

Excluding women

A number of NGOs were deeply critical of the SDG’s commitment to gender equality. A July statement to the UN endorsed by the Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), World Young Women’s Christian Association, Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport and Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights expressed “deep disappointment” with the SDG’s Finance for Development initiative approved at the UN conference in Addis Ababa that month.

“Despite being heralded by many governments as a strong outcome for women and girls,” the statement said, “governments failed to commit to the reforms necessary to redress the profound inequities in our global and national economic policies that condemn women and girls to precarious forms of employment; increase their burden of unpaid care work; undermine their livelihoods as smallholder farmers and fisherfolks; and jeopardise their access to essential public services such as safe and reliable urban and rural transport services, which in turn hampers access to health and education.”

A damning report by the Women’s Major Group at the UN praised the SDG process for representing a “significant step,” but identified eight major “red flags” where the process had fallen short. Despite endorsing “gender equality,” the SDGs failed to recognise key human rights relevant to women and girls:

“… the human right to food, the right to water and sanitation as a goal, women’s rights to decision making on peace and security, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the right for women to control their sexuality free of coercion, discrimination and violence, amongst others are notably absent.”

The SDGs also limit government responsibilities regarding protection of reproductive rights “to those already elaborated in existing agreements. This is not good enough,” argued the UN group.

In fact, despite overwhelming support from UN member states for a more robust and transformative approach, the report reveals that “a vocal minority, including the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, has once again blocked consensus.”

Obscuring the root causes of poverty

The failure of the SDG process to incorporate such criticisms from the UN’s own Major Groups representing marginalised communities, is a direct result of entrenched power disparities within the UN itself.

According to an expert report circulated to UN officials, a detailed analysis of SDG documents reveals that the entire process has been “fundamentally compromised” by corporations with a vested interest in continuing business-as-usual.

Commissioned by Washington DC-based nonprofit TheRules.org — a global collective campaigning to address the root causes of poverty — the report is based on a ‘frame analysis’: a social science method of analysing linguistic and conceptual patterns to reveal how people define, construct, and process information.

Authored by systems theorist Joe Brewer, Director of Research at TheRules.org, the report concludes that the UN’s vision is “doomed to failure” because it simply ignores the structural causes of global poverty.

“The single biggest problem is the structural absence of any discussion about political agendas,” said Brewer.

“As the politics of development are completely removed from discussion in the SDG process, this agenda gets adopted by default without any deliberation or debate. Add to this the myopic focus on growth as the only solution and we get the antithesis of sustainability or inclusive economics as a result.”

In addition to mis-framing the structural origins of poverty, the report shows that the very concept of “development” deployed within the UN’s SDG documents derives from a “specifically neoliberal and corporatist conception of how the world does and should work.”

Despite acknowledging “deep problems and contradictions when relying on GDP growth to tackle poverty”, the SDG agenda still leaves “undifferentiated, perpetual growth” as the prime basis of development.

Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/un-plan-to-save-earth-is-fig-leaf-for-big-business-insiders/