A recent post by El Dragon got me pulled once again in to researching the dirty deeds of multinationals cashing in on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
What’s worse is when the CSR stuff isn’t all that socially responsible.
Take Dole’s Organic Banana Program. Sure, there’s some interesting tracebility stuff going on where you can type in a number here and see some photos of the big organic plantation your banana came from. For good measure, they blast you with stuff about carbon neutrality efforts, etc., etc. etc. I was specifically interested in one of their organic producers on the site, Farm 780 and 773, which are part of the Daabon Group in the country of Colombia.
If you want to see how Daabon farms produce bananas, you can see some pictures of a clear cut banana plantation and sprinkers here and here, and find out that they’ve been growing organic bananas here for about 5 years or so. But seriously, the pictures look like a corn and bean farm on any Midwest road trip…not my kind of organic. Along with bananas, the Daabon Group is also a big producer of organic palm oil, and their biggest customer is the great and benevolent Body Shop, another great CSR junkie. (I could write an entire entry about palm oil as well, but whether you’re talking how Daabon produces bananas or palm oil, there’s nothing environmentally sound about cutting down rainforests, I’ll say that much.)
But the stark, uneventful boredom of this site, or Dole and The Body Shop’s relationship, wasn’t what caused me to don my FFF mask, it was the story Dole and Body Shop don’t mention – the one about human rights vilotaions, land grabbing, and typical ruthless stuff you think about all the other multinational plantations around the globe. From that last link (Banana Land Campaign):
According to Dole’s own website, it does business with “the Daabon Group of the Dávila family,” one of the most powerful families in Magdalena…The Dávila family has long-documented ties to drug trafficking, and has been firmly linked to the Northern Block paramilitaries and the principal intelligence agency DAS [of Colombia] itself tainted with paramilitary ties.
In short, the Daabon Group used local riot police to kick 500 people of their land, destroy their food crops, demolish their housing, clear cut surounding communal forestry (perhaps those pictures on the Dole site?) and drain wetlands to produce palm oil (loving that Body Shop now, right?). Oh yeah, I forgot about the scandal about massive agricultural subsidies funneled to Daabon, and a laundry list of drug trafficking (c’mon, it’s Colombia).
Whew….so what did Dole and The Body Shop do about all these abuses?
Body Shop made a short, meaningless statement that suggests we should be hearing more from an independent evaluation of the “land dispute” as soon as May, 2010. But folks aren’t stupid.
Dole’s got nothing….’cept of course for those damn ugly pictures
In fact, Daabon is the one that actually has a lot of PR stuff about the “land dispute” on their website, and some recent updates. Not so much about the drugs and money laundering, but again, it’s a rich and powerful family in Colombia selling product to Dole and The Body Shop…what do you want from these people?
They have actually gone even further to correct, ….err, cover up, their mess by highly publicizing their “fair trade” bananas in Japan.These are Ecocert AND Rainforest Alliance (a la Chiquita) certified – so you know it’s tasty and free of any real social or economic change. Again, I’ll reiterate, there’s NOTHING environmentally sound about clear-cutting rainforests for palm oil and banana production – whether certified organic or not.
Evictions, bullying, drugs, money laundering, and deforestation — now THAT is a corporate social responsibility campaign I can really get behind.
How about you folks? Any other fun CSR, green washing madness that you know of?
