Global Policy Forum

By Doug Norlen

What they are, how they impact development, the environment and human rights, and what the international reform campaign is doing about it.

Introduction: What are ECAs?

Export Credit Agencies and Investment Insurance Agencies, commonly known as ECAs, are public agencies that provide government-backed loans, guarantees, credits and insurance to private corporations from their home country to do business abroad, particularly in the financially and politically risky developing world. Most industrialized nations have at least one ECA, which is usually an official or quasi-official branch of their government. [*]

Today, ECAs are collectively among the largest sources of public financial support for foreign corporate involvement in industrial projects in the developing world. For example, ECAs are estimated to support four times the amount of oil, gas and mining projects as do all Multilateral Development Banks such as the World Bank Group. Half of all new greenhouse gas-emitting industrial projects in developing countries have some form of ECA support. ECAs often back such projects even though the World Bank Group and other multilateral banks find them too risky and potentially harmful to support.

What are the Impacts of these ECAs?

Now one of the biggest source of financing for harmful projects. "In recent years ECAs are estimated to have supported between US $50 - $70 billion annually in what are called "medium and long-term transactions," a great portion of which are large industrial and infrastructure projects in developing countries. Many of these projects have very serious environmental and social impacts. For example, ECAs finance greenhouse gas-emitting power plants, large scale dams, mining projects, road development in pristine tropical forests, oil pipelines, chemical and industrial facilities, forestry and plantation schemes, to name a few.

Because most of these projects are high risk due to their environmental, political, social and cultural impacts, most would not come to life without the support and financial backing of ECAs. Hence, ECAs are strategic development linchpins that play an enormous part in the harmful impacts of corporate globalization.

Undercutting progress, violating laws... While the World Bank Group and most bilateral aid agencies have minimum social and environmental guidelines, most ECAs have few or no such standards in place. Hence, the same countries that accept and promote environmental and social policies through their aid agencies and their membership in the World Bank Group circumvent or disregard these same policies when supporting projects through their ECAs. The lack of environmental and social policies and associated professional staff to perform due diligence also results in ECA projects that contravene the international environmental, human rights and other treaties and agreements to which these ECAs' own governments are party.

Fueling a race to the bottom... ECAs help corporations within their own country expand into the developing world, and as a result they compete intensely with ECAs from other countries that do the same. They are quick to back projects that other ECAs and multilateral development banks will refuse on environmental and social grounds. This creates a "race to the bottom," that encourages ECA support of projects with weak or no project environmental or social safeguards.

One of the best examples of the race to the bottom is the Three Gorges Dam in China: This project is known for the displacement of 1.8 million people, the flooding of millions of hectares of prime farmland, multi-billion dollar cost overruns, and corruption. In 1996, the German, Swiss and Canadian ECAs raced with one another to help finance this project, even though the World Bank and US Export Import Bank had refused to support it on environmental grounds. Now growing internal opposition in China is calling for a scaling down and even a halt to the gigantic dam.

No transparency and contempt for affected communities...Another characteristic of ECAs is an often complete lack of public disclosure of the impacts of their projects. Most ECAs are not required to conduct environmental impact assessments. Nor do they consult with affected communities and civil society in the development of their projects. This lack of public discourse is antagonistic to democratic principles and highly suspect since ECAs back projects that affect people's health, environment, and their ability to maintain a sustainable local livelihood.

Most ECAs do not disclose the name, nature or location for the projects they back even after the project is well underway or completed. In so doing, ECAs place the desires of private corporations and their own economic gain above the rights of citizens to protect their lives and environment. This obviously contradicts the principles of democracy and transparency to which their parent governments aspire.

Corruption... According to Transparency International, "Bribing foreign officials in order to secure overseas contracts for their exports has become a widespread practice in industrial countries, particularly in certain sectors such as exports of military equipment and public works. Normally these contracts are guaranteed by government - owned or - supported Export Credit Insurance (ECI) schemes (HERMES in Germany, COFACE in France, DUCROIRE in Belgium, ECGD in the UK)."

Crushing debt... ECAs for the most part also have no developmental mandate or obligations, yet they account for the single biggest component of developing country debt, consisting in 1996 some 24% of total debt and 56% of debt owed to official agencies. While proper debt management can lead to positive development impacts, ECAs often push countries to create debt to pay back loans for projects that are inconsistent with the goals of sustainable development, that have design weaknesses, and that are associated with corruption. Thus, to the extent that excessive or inappropriate developing country debt loads shackles the sustainable development process in these countries, ECAs are in large part responsible.

Arms transfers and human rights abuses... ECAs-backed projects are too-often associated with human right abuses in developing countries. For example, large hydro-electric projects such as the proposed Ilisu dam in Turkey can result in the forced resettlement of tens of thousands of people and the flooding of historically and culturally significant communities. Typically, the people resettled are never fairly or adequately compensated, and are forced to live in unfamiliar cultural surroundings and living conditions that are worse than they had before. In the case of Ilisu, many in the communities to be flooded are primarily of the Kurdish minority and view this practice as an extension of decades of repression and war inflicted upon them by the Turkish government. Downstream countries including Syria and Iraq fear that Turkey will use the dam to curtail water flow in this arid, and politically unstable region.

ECAs are also frequently involved in supporting the export of arms and military equipment to war-torn countries, for example, UK-made Hawk fighter jets or US-made Black Hawk helicopters that are exported to countries like Indonesia and Columbia. Once out of the control of the exporters' hands and into the control of the government, these arms are potentially used to kill innocent people and otherwise violate human rights. Moreover, ECA-backed arms transfers are typically onerous debt-producing transactions for countries from the start because they are "non-productive expenditures" that are not associated with economically productive activities that can contribute to debt repayment. Hence, in addition to fostering human rights abuses, these arms transfers can create a vicious cycle that can weaken a country's economic health and in turn fuel more conflict.

Increasing risks they were designed to protect against... The ECAs' "race to the bottom" does more than harm the environment and human communities; it also results in project standards that are so low or non-existent that their absence increases some of the very political risks against which these public agencies were designed to protect. A specific example: the Antamina mine in Peru, insured by the Canadian ECA, Export Development Corporation, experiences civil disturbances such as organized picketing, blockades and strikes that target the project due to its negative impact on local peoples' fishing areas and livelihoods. Another example: ECA backing for the sale of military aircraft to Indonesia, absent adequate controls over their use, contributed to its military and political instability. As a 22 September 1999 "Financial Times" editorial pointed out, careless industrialized country export credit agencies share a major responsibility for "Violence in East Timor and economic disaster in Indonesia." ECAs' support of projects that exacerbate the very risks they were designed to protect against can be compared to a flu medicine that spreads influenza.

Assuming no responsibility... When ECAs' lack of adequate safeguards and due diligence leads to project failures and heightened risks, it is often other branches of their respective governments that must respond. For example, countries' foreign ministries and militaries may be called in to help quell uprising resulting in part from local opposition to ECA-backed projects. Countries' federal treasuries may ultimately cover financial losses stemming from claims by failed ECA project sponsors. The fact that the political and financial cost of project failures and resultant external impacts is borne by others than the ECA and their corporate clients is an indication of a moral hazard that encourages ECAs' harmful activities to continue. Thanks to ECA support, private commercial banks can shirk much of their responsibilities as well. As a Midland Bank executive in charge of arms deals once described, "You see, before we advance monies to a company, we always insist on any funds being covered by the [UK] Export Credit Guarantee Department...We can't lose. After 90 days, if the Iraqis haven't coughed up, the company gets paid instead by the British Government. Either way, we recover our loan, plus interest of course. Its beautiful."[i]

For their part, ECAs continue to resist change. The OECD Export Credit Group (ECG), the body where ECAs periodically gather to discuss common issues, strongly resists requests by NGOs and project affected communities to meet, and only this year agreed to meet with three representatives of affected communities. Likewise, its members pay little respect to the findings of other OECD bodies. According to an OECD task force assessing environmental assessment practice: "There was widespread concern among the Task Force regarding the general lack of environmental guidelines applied to the development activities of the bilateral commercial lending and credit agencies. With a few notable exceptions, the environmental assessment requirements imposed on the bilateral aid agencies of the DAC (OECD Development Advisory Committee) Members do not apply to the commercial arms of bilateral government financing (ECAs). Virtually every Member cited examples where the lack of appropriate environmental planning of projects funded by such organizations had caused significant ecological and social problems. They were of the opinion that the environmental damage resulting from such ventures far outweighed the damage caused from lack of coherence among bilateral donors."[ii]

ECAs have also managed to antagonize other government officials and agencies, including even those sympathetic of the process of corporate globalization. According to European Union Trade Secretary, Pascal Lamy: "I too am frustrated with the ECAs' lack of progress in adopting common environmental policies. Every time any of them move forward a millimeter, they stop to see if anybody else moved."[iii] Indeed, ECAs even resist the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the countries they represent. For example, since 1996 the G-8 has issued three separate mandates for ECA environmental policy reform, and all have gone unfulfilled.

Isolating themselves... ECAs insist that they should not have adopt minimal environmental and social policies that other mature international organizations have long accepted as normal, common practice. ECAs argue that they shouldn't have to apply such safeguards because their unique mission makes them different from other international finance institutions like the World Bank Group, different from aid agencies, and different from domestic agencies in their own countries. However, in distancing themselves from virtually every other kind of public agency in the world, ECAs isolate themselves, alienate others, and present a clearer target for citizens and government officials that are concerned about the negative impacts of corporate globalization. Indeed, in resisting these concerns, ECAs seem to be heading for the same kind of political debacle as befell the failed and now infamous OECD Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in the late 1990s. In the case of the MAI, which would also reduce local communities' abilities to protect their environment and human rights, a very similar pattern of agency secrecy and contempt of civil society led to worldwide opposition and the eventual collapse of this proposed international agreement.

Reason for hope... Despite the slow progress among ECAs in accepting the need to reform, there are hopeful signs on the horizon for change. For example, significant ECA environmental policy reforms have occurred in the Australia and the US in recent years, and there is the distinct possibility that other leading ECAs may follow suit. The UK's ECGD, for example, has recently released a set of proactive business principles that extends beyond the environment to encompass sustainable development and human rights concerns. In Canada, research and investigations by its Parliament and the Department of Foreign Affairs may result in reforms of the Export Development Corporation. In Japan, new environmental policies are now being drafted. NGO engagement of ECAs on specific projects has resulted in some of these projects being shelved and others significantly improved. Still, there remains strong resistance to change by ECAs in many leading countries, and, where change has occurred, close monitoring to ensure implementation is required.

The NGO Campaign:

Since 1996, NGOs from many countries have joined forces in an international campaign to reform ECAs. The goals and demands of the campaign are best described in the Jakarta Declaration for Reform of Official Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agencies, endorsed by over 300 NGOs following a May 2000 international ECA reform strategy session in Jakarta, Indonesia. While focusing on the impacts of ECAs in Indonesia, the Jakarta Declaration has a global "call for reform"that includes: