Brands Matter

BRANDS MATTER

Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies

Coalition of religious, financial, activist groups, pioneered voluntary corporate reporting standards
www.ceres.org

Business for Social Responsibility

Not-for-profit business advisory group
www.bsr.org

Global Environmental Management Initiative

Coalition of companies sharing environmental management information
www.gemi.org

The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI)

An alliance of companies, NGOs and trade unions established to monitor corporate codes of practice. Chiquita is now a member company, having at one time been a target.
www.ethicaltrade.org

Because of their numbers, size and reach multinational companies can be a powerful force for good or ill in the world. Since the early Twentieth Century, the number of multinationals has grown dramatically. A recent study by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) found twenty-nine corporations that were worth more than many countries. The hundred largest companies accounted for 4.3 percent of global gross domestic product in 2000. ExxonMobil, worth $56 billion, outranks both Peru and New Zealand, for example. Multinational company strategies to take advantage of broadened market access have generated new approaches to integrated manufacturing networks and marketing tie-ins that put a premium on global branding. The images are everywhere and make the reach of these companies, if not their actual presence, a global phenomenon impossible to ignore.

At the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, the Rio Summit corporations for the first time played a major role. The theme of the conference was captured in the shorthand phrase "sustainable development." The concept had been introduced in the eighties to address protests from developing countries that saw rich countries' calls for global environmental protection as a conspiracy to prevent their development. Correctly understood, the much-debated concept captures the idea that true progress will only be possible when development does not happen at the expense of the environment, or environmental protection at the expense of development. Its overall aspiration is economic progress that does not jeopardize the future.

Chiquita's spectacular turnaround demonstrates without doubt that major corporations can be powerful engines contributing to sustainable development. This is especially true in the case of Chiquita, since it came from one hundred years of paternalistic dominance in the tropics. Other multinationals are on various trajectories of their own, despite the shameful scandals of a few of them. In the agriculture sector, what remains is for the major supermarket conglomerates to get the message. Informed consumers can be effective instruments in fostering the needed reforms.

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