On Corporate Social Responsibility

There’s been a spike in reports of corporate responsibility recently. UN News Service has one on how CSR helped companies "achieve and retain market leadership". Inter Press News has one on the "hazy" impact of the Global Compact. CSR Asia has one on how irresponsible countries may lose out on a USD$750 billion market. The Herald Tribune has one on the increase in toxic Chinese exports. CorpWatch (via the Inter Press News) has one on how investment firms are being pushed to act responsibly for a terrible mudslide from a gas project they funded. There’s also one in the Wall Street Journal about how Singapore’s Temasek Holdings is feeling international pressure to become more transparent, but I can’t link that because it’s a paid read and I’m too poor to pay for it. Thanks to Professor Montesano for showing it to me.

So, we have some good news and some bad news. Hopefully, over time, the good news will outnumber the bad news. We’ve got another piece of good news to encourage everyone with. Very nice folks at the Glasshouse Partnership (thanks!) have informed us of AccountAbility’s report, summarized on their website thus:

"The State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007: Making Sustainability Count in Global Markets is essentially a progress report on countries’ efforts in advancing competitiveness based on responsible business practices. It provides a unique health check on responsible globalization."

You can download the full PDF report, or take a look at their Responsible Competitiveness World Map, which ranks countries according to how responsibly competitive they are (makes sense, right?). Singapore didn’t come off too bad. We’re 15th. China is 87th (I’m quite scared of their food exports now and my father’s stopped eating snacks from there). Here’s a brief SEAsian view:

Malaysia is 25th, Thailand 37th, Indonesia 48th, Philippines 61st, Cambodia 99th. No news on Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Brunei and East Timor. How strange. Well, at least we know Singapore isn’t all that bad. 15th! Still, there is enormous space for improvement.

News reports on AccountAbility’s report can be found in The Guardian and in Reuters.

All right, folks, it’s lunchtime for me. I shall now go and chew my veggies and wonder from which country they came and which farmer or company grew them, and where my spoons and bowls and cups come from and if all these companies have been good or bad. Bon appetit!

"He’s making a list, and checking it twice…"

From today’s Business Times’ feature on Mr. Sukanto Tanoto, billionaire founder of pulp and paper company Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL).

A major lesson [Mr. Tanoto] has imbibed is the necessity of corporate social responsibility (CSR). One of his most controversial problems was with his first pulp company PT Indoraya Utama in Sumatra, which became the target of a series of violent community protests, amid allegations of pollution and land disputes in the late 1990s. The business eventually shut down.

In a previous interview with the Financial Times, Mr Tanoto admitted candidly: ‘At that time (the Suharto era), we thought that poverty and society and taking care of the people was a government job . . . So we learnt the hard way, we made some mistakes. In the end we realised that when you come to a certain size of operation, you must have a clear sense of social responsibility.’

April, for instance, now has a well-entrenched CSR programme. It issues a detailed sustainability report every two years and works closely with NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to protect high-conservation value forests in Riau, as well as wild animals like elephants.

It funds schools around Kerinci, Riau, where its main operations are based, and has also established an integrated farming system to teach villagers more viable and sustainable alternatives to the slash-and-burn techniques of shifting cultivation. Those who graduate from the three-week courses are given seeds, cattle, fish and fertiliser as start-up capital.

In my mind APRIL had always been associated with illegal timber exports, illegal forest clearing and the haze. To hear that APRIL even has a CSR programme and works closely with WWF is, to put it mildly, surprising.

So I checked out the corporate website.

It seems that an extraordinary effort has been made to stem accusations of environmental irresponsibility. Right there on the front page - where companies usually market their products or services -  we see APRIL mentioning sustainability twice, and a very overt list of the companies CSR commitments. We learn immediately that the company is a member of the UN Global Compact, "corporate partner" of the UNEP awards, and that it works with the WWF. Moving further into the website, we find annual sustainability reports and semi-annual CSR newsletters.

It should be quite interesting to see how the corporate rhetoric gels with external allegations…

"Beijing’s Forbidden City palace is considering closing a Starbucks on its grounds after protests led by a TV personality who says the American coffeehouse’s presence is eroding Chinese culture.

A news anchor for China Central Television has led an online campaign to remove the Starbucks, which opened in 2000 at the invitation of palace managers, who needed to raise money to maintain the 587-year-old complex of villas and gardens.

Starbucks’ presence ‘undermined the Forbidden City’s solemnity and trampled over Chinese culture’, the anchorman, Rui Chenggang, wrote in his blog. Xinhua said ‘thousands of Chinese’ backed the campaign but did not say how."

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