This conference is entitled "Greenwashing the FTAA?" and, as you can probably guess from the name, it was initially conceived in order to criticize and to counterbalance the other conference which took place here at McGill over the last two days: the "Greening the FTAA" conference, organized by Environmental Law McGill (or ELM).
Before proceeding to our speakers, I would like to give you a brief account of our interaction with the ELM conference so that you can get a better idea of the motivation for mounting this conference.
When we first heard about the ELM conference, suspicions were raised because of the identity of certain funding backers - namely DFAIT and Export Development Canada. These are organizations that have a mandate to pursue economic growth, not to uphold environmental priorities. "Greening the FTAA?" was supposed to be a conference questioning whether the FTAA could be 'greened'. With funders like that, we figured the net result of the conference might very likely be a greenwash.
So we began scrutinizing the make-up of the panels at the ELM conference, and our immediate perception was that they lacked adequate representation from among those whose lives are likely to be most affected by the environmental impacts of a potential FTAA; that is, from among the rural and indigenous peoples of the South. We also found a fair number of pro-FTAA government representatives, and a few from industry, although not more than a handful. But we mainly noticed that there was heavy preponderance of people involved in the 'sustainable development' agenda.
I must say a word about sustainability at this point. Most people automatically think of 'sustainability' as the ultimate goal of environmentalism. The object is to construct economic and social systems which depend on renewable resources, and in such a manner that they are not depleted.
But with appearance of the Brundtland Report in 1987, a narrower sort of sustainability was created which is known as 'sustainable development'. It is narrower because it outlines a specific programme for attaining sustainability, and one of the things which it places particular emphasis on in pursuing that goal is 'economic growth'.
Now whether the 'sustainable development' as outlined in the Brundtland Report is workable in theory is beyond the scope of this introduction. But the important thing to realize here is how this opens the possibility for abuse. Economic growth policies can be pursued vigorously -- supposedly as a component of a sustainable development programme - while redistribution and equity aspects are left not seriously attended to. So from the point of view of industry, Sustainable Development has great greenwash potential.
And this is, in fact, what is happening. Increasingly, we are seeing sustainable development being mentioned in the preambles of trade agreements, while more substantive environmental components are disappearing.
Coming back to the ELM conference, this SD issue was - and still is - a major concern of ours. The presence of people associated with the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), for instance, is not reassuring. This is an organization which is, after all, receiving funding from sources which include: DFAIT, the World Bank, the WTO, Pan Canadian Petroleum Limited, Shell Canada, Newmont Mining Corporation, Forest Products Association (whose members include Domtar and Weyerhauser), Mining Association of Canada, Trans Canada Pipelines, etc. What these funding sources like about the IISD is that it is an organization that is willing to go along with trade regimes and other economic growth policies so long as there is some spinoff growth opportunities for the sustainable development agenda institutions.
Now I think it is important to note that although we were criticized for coming down heavily on ELM right after we first announced our counter-conference, the fact is that the ELM panels began to change shortly afterwards. The distribution of voices on the panels you saw during the past two days - although still leaving much to be desired - was considerably improved since the announcement of the "Greenwashing" conference. There were more alternative voices, and they were much more equitably distributed that originally scheduled. This was facilitated by a joint logistics effort on the part of the SNSF and ELM in bringing in a couple of alternative Latin American speakers, but we also recognize ELM's bona fide independent effort to rectify things.
But there are obviously limitations to what extent funding partner interests can be transcended. The fact is that without the 'sustainable development' being written into the conference mission statement - plus the presence of a few key people on the skeletal conference roster - funding from organizations like DFAIT and the EDC would never have been forthcoming in the first place. While the weight shifted with respect to other aspects of the conference, the emphasis on 'sustainable development' agenda never really diminished.
As a final note, and I think this might be a nice segue into what our next speaker will be talking about, I want to point out that as we see it, the lesson to be gleaned from this SNSF initiative is clear: whether in terms of of a one-on-one debate or in terms of duelling conferences, fruitful opposition requires the creation of a dialectic. This does not automatically imply a confrontational stance, but it does demand a refusal to compromise on core positions....