Tarzan, Indiana Jones and Conservation International's Global Greenwash Machine
By Aziz Choudry
October 10, 2003
Colin Powell says that its work is “amazing”. In 2001, it received what the media dubbed the biggest ever grant to an
environmental organization – US $261 million spread over 10 years. Its website proclaims: “A passionate few can make the
difference in the world.”
In interviews, its president, Russell Mittermeier, confesses to a lifelong Tarzan fixation. Its vice-chair is the actor
who played Indiana Jones.
The organization is Conservation International (CI). Founded in 1987, headquartered in Washington, DC, its stated
mission is “to conserve the Earth’s living natural heritage, our global biodiversity, and to demonstrate that human
societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.” It operates in over thirty countries, in the Americas, Asia,
Africa and the Pacific.
But like Harrison Ford, it does a lot of acting, applying copious layers of green make-up.
Perhaps CI draws inspiration from its Hollywood heroes. Remember how the white actors got all the best lines, how the
“natives” were not quite human, frequently savage and dangerous, sometimes simply incidental and irrelevant?
Unfortunately, for many Indigenous Peoples affected by CI’s brand of “conservation”, this is no movie set.
CI’s interest in protecting “hotspots” of endangered biodiversity has particular implications for many Indigenous
Peoples who have endured and resisted waves of colonial dispossession, genocide and ecocide, including the appropriation
of traditional knowledge and the flora and fauna which they have protected for many generations.
It is no coincidence that Indigenous Peoples continue to live in the world’s remaining biodiverse regions. They are
inextricably connected to these ecosystems. However, CI frequently depicts them as threats to the environment, accusing
them of illegal logging, overpopulation and slash-and-burn agriculture. Leave it to the experts to save these places,
says CI, through “applying innovations in science, economics, policy and community participation to protect the Earth's
richest regions of plant and animal diversity in the hotspots, major tropical wilderness areas and key marine
ecosystems”.
CI claims to work with local communities on conservation-based alternatives to logging and other
environmentally-destructive activities – ecotourism and small enterprises to grow and market coffee, exotic foods,
chemicals and medicines from the rainforest. Playing the role of an environmental NGO, CI participates in the plunder of
the global South.
Meanwhile, it willingly collaborates with, and fails to condemn, some of the world’s most ecologically destructive
corporations and institutions devastating the planet.
After all, CI’s major supporters include Cemex, Citigroup, Chiquita, Exxon Mobil Foundation, Ford, Gap, J P Morgan Chase
and Co., McDonalds, Sony, Starbucks, United Airlines and Walt Disney. Gordon Moore, the chair of CI’s executive
committee – and donor of the $261 million grant – founded Intel Corporation. CI claims that its corporate supporters
“know that their customers, shareholders and employees share a common concern about protecting the environment.” The
boards and committees of its various divisions read like a who’s who of big business.
CI uses its considerable financial resources, political influence and environmental sweettalk to quietly access,
administer and buy biodiverse areas throughout the world and put them at the disposal of transnational corporations.
Bioprospecting is a central plank of CI’s operations. "Bioprospecting by itself will not save the rainforest, but
combined with other activities, it will," said Marianne Guerin-McManus, CI’s conservation finance director. Really?
CI’s track record suggests a motivation to conserve biodiversity as a resource for bioprospecting for its private sector
partners rather than any concern for the rights of the peoples who have lived with, and protected these ecosystems for
so long.
Pharmaceutical companies want to access indigenous communities’ knowledge to find plants and traditional ways of using
them because this gives them a far higher chance to find potential pharmaceutical products than random screening.
In 1997 CI signed a comprehensive bioprospecting agreement with California-based company Hyseq, which specializes in
genomic sequencing. CI agreed to pre-screen drug candidates derived from flora and fauna samples, and provide regular
reports on its research findings to Hyseq. As well as an initial contribution, Hyseq would pay CI on a country basis,
and an annual fee. Hyseq is free to pursue intellectual property claims over any results.
In Panama, CI worked with Novartis, Monsanto, and others, in “ecologically guided bioprospecting” – seeking
pharmaceutical and agricultural products from plants, fungi and insects. In Surinam it cooperated with Bristol Myers
Squibb, with its ethnobotanists collecting plant samples. CI worked to win the trust of Indigenous communities and
healers and negotiate a very dubious “benefit-sharing” agreement. Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI – now
the ETC Group) criticized the deal for the paltry percentage (believed to be around 2-3% of any royalties) offered to
Indigenous communities, and said that it is unlikely that the communities fully understood the implications before they
consented. The Surinam and Panama missions were part of the US-government backed International Cooperative Biodioversity
Group program.
Half a world away, in Makira province in the Solomon Islands, CI runs a project which sees local people harvesting the
ngali nut, which belongs to the canarium family. CI claims that this provides a viable economic alternative to logging
the country’s tropical forests. This project supplies the operations of an Australian entrepreneur, Peter Hull. While
owning a pharmacy in the Solomons’ capital, Honiara in the 1980s, he became interested in the health benefits of the
widely-consumed nut, noting the low incidence of arthritis among Solomon Islanders.
On May 28 2002, Hull was granted a patent by the US Patent Office for use of the nut oil in the “treatment of arthritis
and other similar conditions”. He is applying for patents in 127 countries. He markets a product, derived from the nut
oil, called Arthrileaf. On his website www.theapothecary.com, Hull says that he and CI work together to convince village elders “that it is in their best interests to preserve and
protect their rain forest, in order to harvest the Ngali nuts from it.”
A July 2003 Edmonds Institute bulletin warns that the patent is so broad that it could apply to other varieties of
canarium grown in other parts of the Pacific and Asia. While Arthrileaf can earn Hull an estimated US $10,000 for each
kilogram of nut oil, last year the World Bank put per capita income in the Solomons at $570. It seems to be another
example of a CI collaboration which supports the rights of private companies to cash in on traditional knowledge and
patent lifeforms. The locals – pardon the pun – get peanuts.
Conservation International’s involvement in the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, is deeply disturbing. Through a 1991
debt-for-nature swap, CI bought the right to set up a genetic research station in the Monte Azules Biosphere reserve in
the Selva. CI is urging Mexico’s government to evict indigenous communities in Montes Azules, accusing them of
destroying the rainforest.
A June 2003 report by Chiapas-based Center for Political Analysis and Social Investigation (CAPISE) dubbed CI a Trojan
Horse of the US government and transnational corporations. It revealed that CI’s program of flyovers – part of their
USAID-supported “environmental monitoring” program - flew over areas occupied by Zapatista communities in planes which
bore USAID markings. In Chiapas, CI uses state-of-the art geographical information systems (GIS) technology, including
high resolution satellite imaging. In the name of environmental protection, it is pitting Indigenous communities against
each other, raising fears of conflict in an area which is already heavily militarized by Mexico’s army. In March 2003,
Global Exchange convened an emergency delegation to the area and found the destruction most pronounced around military
encampments, while Indigenous villagers had outlawed slash-and-burn techniques and were practicing sustainable organic
agriculture.
The giant Mexican agribusiness/biotechnology corporation, Grupo Pulsar works closely with CI in Mexico. Between 1996 and
2000 it donated US $10 million to CI-Mexico. Pulsar’s claimed concern for ecology and biodiversity does not extend to
its main activities which include the promotion of monoculture in Chiapas, including the planned planting of 300,000
hectares of eucalypt trees. The Chiapas-based Centro de Investigationes Economicas y Politicas de Accion Comunitaria
(CIEPAC - Center of Economic and Political Research for Community Action) believes that “the Pulsar Group's "donation"
could more likely be a remuneration (but free of taxes, since it's a donation) for services lent by CI in
bio-prospecting within the Selva Lacandona. Pulsar has the technology, the resources and the business knowledge to know
that there are large rewards awaiting the "discovery" of some medicinal property extracted from samples from the
Lacandona. CI "facilitates" the Pulsar Group's entrance, it helps orient its technicians in the prospecting, while at
the same time pacifying local populations with programs that promote the expansion of mono-crops around the Selva, while
projecting a conservation façade to the world.”
In many countries, the establishment of CI-initiated protected areas have trampled on Indigenous Peoples’ land, social,
spiritual, cultural, political and economic rights, without consultation, in deals cut with governments and corporations
in the name of “conservation”. The Wai Wai and Wapishana in southern Guyana recently accused CI of “gross disrespect”
towards Indigenous Peoples in moves to set up a protected area on their territories.
Given the significant involvement of mining, oil and gas corporations in CI’s program it is sobering to note that many
of its “biodiversity hotspots” and project operations are on or adjacent to sites of oil, gas and mineral exploration
and extraction – Chiapas, Palawan (Philippines), Colombia, West Papua, Aceh (Indonesia) and Papua New Guinea, for
example. Indigenous Peoples continue to resist the corporate assaults on their territories, while CI actively champions
the causes of these companies to be seen as environmentally and socially responsible.
In September 2002, mining giant Rio Tinto launched a partnership with CI in southeastern Guinea’s Pic De Fon, giving
support for a rapid assessment program of the rich biodiversity in a forest area in which Rio Tinto was exploring (it
has diamond and iron ore operations in Guinea). Rio Tinto’s environmental policy adviser Tom Burke sits on the advisory
board for CI’s Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB), along with executives from International Paper,
Starbucks, and BP.
According to CI, the partnership in Guinea “addresses Rio Tinto's business needs while furthering CI's conservation
goals.” The CELB is a partnership between CI and the Ford Motor Company, and its executive board is chaired by Lord
Browne of Madingley, the Group chief executive of BP.
CI’s website boasts of its partnership for conservation with Citigroup in Brazil, Peru, and South Africa. Rainforest
Action Network dubbed Citigroup “the Most Destructive Bank in the World” precisely for its role in financing the
destruction of old growth forests.
Another CI project is the Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI). Convened by the CELB, participants include BP,
ChevronTexaco, Conservation International, Fauna & Flora International, Shell, Smithsonian Institution, Statoil, The Nature Conservancy, and IUCN - The World Conservation
Union. This August, he EBI released a collaborative report, “Energy and Biodiversity: Integrating Biodiversity
Conservation into Oil and Gas Development”. The mind boggles. CI is also a member of the industry-driven “Responding to
Climate Change” greenwash initiative ( www.rtcc.org)
Given its corporate nature, and its “partnerships”, it is easy to see why CI is so uncritical about the impact of
economic injustice on the environment and biodiversity. Indeed it proposes market “solutions” to address environmental
destruction that has been caused or exacerbated by freemarket capitalism. CI believes that the best way to conserve
biodiversity is to privatize it. In a recent In These Times article, US journalist and writer Bill Weinberg sees this
approach leading to tropical forests becoming “corporate-administered genetic colonies.”
CI supports the World Bank-backed MesoAmerican Biological Corridor project. Many indigenous communities, social
movements and NGOs have condemned this as an attempt to greenwash the massive Plan Puebla Panama infrastructure scheme,
and as a front for corporate biopiracy in the region.
CI is also a partner in the Congo Basin Forest Partnership, with the World Bank and the American Forest and Paper
Association (US timber and paper industry lobby group), launched by Colin Powell at last year’s World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
In the struggles for social and ecological justice, and against corporate colonialism, it is very clear which side
Conservation International is on. Not ours.
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This article is also published at Zmag.org. See… http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-10/10choudry.cfm