On Corporate Social Responsibility

Channel News Asia reports:

Campaigners representing the rural poor, the environment and organised labour blasted the communique as a sideshow, stage-managed for corporations who are major contributors to the World Water Council, which organises the Forum…

"We demand that the allocation of water be decided in an open, transparent and democratic forum rather than in a trade show for the world’s large corporations."

Full article here.

Interestingly, Ethical Corporation Institute says that big businesses like Rio Tinto, SAB Miller, Coca-Cola, Intel and Molson Coors are "leading the way in water management" (link here) and saliently, Jeff Conant said last year:

As we learn from the WWF website, “One of the benefits of joining the WWC is the Council’s ability to influence decisions related to world water management that affect organizations, business, and communities.” Perhaps their secret meetings will also be attended by executives of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose recent partnership with Coca-Cola aims to help the global soft-drink giant become “the most efficient company in the world in terms of water use,” with “every drop of water it uses… returned to the earth or compensated for through conservation and recycling programs.” And, with this blending of fact and fiction, it would hardly be surprising to find Greene’s signature on the CEO Water Mandate, which has companies with such devastating environmental track records as Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, Unilever, and Nestlé pledging to “help address the water challenge faced by the world today.”

Full article here. The italicized names are linked to rather interesting pages in the original article. Greene here refers to James Bonds’ villain in Quantum of Solace.

What does one make of it all? Alas, these great tides of information and opinion indeed confound the mind.