By Patricia Lamiell
Associated PressMarch 12, 1999 New York - A new U.N. third-world economic development effort with multinational corporations is raising questions among organizations who wonder whether alleged human-rights and environmental abuses by some of the companies are being overlooked. At least 16 corporations have already paid $50,000 as seed money for the initiative, which critics claim will allow companies an easy opportunity to use the highly valuable U.N. name to help build new businesses.
The United Nations is considering creating a logo incorporating its name that corporate sponsors could use. That's a powerful tool in many underdeveloped countries, where the United Nations provides food, shelter and other basics of everyday life.
Some of the companies involved "are so deeply mired in these human-rights and environmental problems that it's a bad choice to start with, if they're looking to set examples," said Joshua Karliner, executive director of the Transnational Resource & Action Center, one of the human-rights organizations that circulated an internal United Nations memo describing the program.
The list includes Dow Chemical Corp., creator of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange. Dow failed to return phone calls Thursday for comment on the U.N. initiative. It also includes Royal Dutch/Shell Group, which is among the oil companies that a U.N. human rights envoy wants to investigate for alleged widespread environmental damage in Nigeria. Other companies involved have records in foreign countries that haven't come into question, such as the telecommunications giant AT&T, the Swedish cellular phone maker Ericsson, and the furniture maker Ikea of Denmark.
Transnational charged that sponsoring companies could use the United Nations connection to forge critical local and government relationships that will make it easier for them to do future projects that won't be under the watchful eye of the United Nations. Officials at the United Nations Development Programme, the development arm of the United Nations, did not deny that the list includes some corporations with negative profiles. But they fiercely defended the program as a way for corporate bad-actors to redeem themselves. "Whether we like it or not, the global corporations are having a great impact on the development of poor countries," said Eimi Watanabe, a U.N. development policy official. "Quite often, there have been negative consequences of those projects, and we are trying to turn it around into a positive impact."
The new project was originally set to launch this June. It has been postponed until at least next spring, but could shape up to be much different from other U.N. endeavors. It will focus less on traditional, large-scale development, like dams, and more on education, health-care, helping people get access to telephones and computers, and making tiny loans to nascent businesses. Watanabe said plans are to start in Central and South America and parts of Africa.
Under the plan being considered, the projects will be at minimum jointly run by corporations and United Nations, and it is possible that the companies will be allowed to run the projects themselves, largely without U.N. interference. Watanabe said corporate sponsors will have to comply with U.N. human-rights and environmental guidelines. "It would be totally contradictory to our mandate... if we sell the U.N. name to projects that don't meet our standards," she said.
The United Nations gets most of its money from governments, although U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has been engaged in a campaign to get corporations more involved with U.N. relief and development efforts. The campaign comes as the United Nations struggles to pay its debt while the United States, its biggest contributor, has refused to pay back dues because of political disagreements between the Congress and the Clinton Administration. The United States is $1.3 billion in arrears, a sum that represents two-thirds of the United Nation's entire debt.
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