It’s global conference season, and once again the corporate sector is spending huge amounts of money — money that comes from us when we purchase their products and services — to lobby for their own special interests.
There are two big problems with this.
The first is that corporate interests often do not align with the public interest. Corporations exist to make profits and to return those profits to their shareholders.
There are decades, indeed centuries, of experience that show us that corporations are more than happy to make money by producing and selling unhealthy or dangerous products, polluting and damaging the environment, exploiting their workers, harming communities and undermining democracy.
The second problem is the dramatic imbalance between corporate power and the power of civil society organizations that are acting in the public interest to protect our wellbeing, our environment, our communities, workers and our democracy.
While corporations are immensely wealthy and have large workforces devoted to their lobbying work, civil society organizations are often struggling to raise funds, and depend often on volunteers.
These two problems are highlighted in the recently completed COP16 global conference on biodiversity and the current COP29 global conference on climate change. Both have seen large numbers of corporate lobbyists working, for the most part, to obfuscate discussions and delay action so as to protect their business opportunities and profits.
“Representatives of business and industry groups more than doubled at the UN’s latest biodiversity summit,” according to DeSmog, an international organization that exposes environmental misinformation campaigns.
This increase was proportionally much greater than the 46 per cent increase in overall attendance.
Of the 1,261 corporate delegates they counted — and these numbers are an underestimate, DeSmog admits, because its methodology is conservative — the largest number, 124, were from banks.
This included “more than half of the 30 banks named as the biggest financiers of deforestation” in an October report from Forests and Finance. That report found that banks have invested $395 billion in deforestation since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
There were also large numbers of delegates from the fossil-fuel industry and big food and agriculture firms, as well as from the agrochemical and seed companies and the pharmaceutical industry — the latter intent on avoiding a tax on their use of genetic data from nature. Bayer alone brought 12 delegates, more than some countries.
In addition, big tech is showing an interest in biodiversity because of the large data needs for monitoring biodiversity.
To make matters worse, Canada — along with Brazil, Mexico and Switzerland — included corporate representatives and their lobby groups in their national delegation, “lending pesticides and biotechnology representatives direct access to negotiations,” noted DeSmog.
Unsurprisingly, environmental NGOs were concerned: In a related article in The Guardian, Oscar Soria, director of the Common Initiative think tank, wrote: “We certainly saw a stronger lobbying push for policies that favour agricultural productivity, and that clashed with the conservation goals and the position of civil society.”
Meanwhile, over in Baku, Azerbaijan, the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change treaty is underway. And surprise, surprise, the fossil-fuel industry is there in strength, too.
The Kick Big Polluters Out coalition reported there are at least 1,773 fossil-fuel lobbyists, more than nearly every country and more than “all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.”
Describing fossil-fuel advocates as having a “chokehold” on international climate diplomacy, Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, told Canada’s National Observer it’s time to “free COPs from the influence of big polluters.”
Lobbying by the private sector, using our money to lobby against our interests, has to stop.
As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Canada barred corporate interests from the development of the new Canada Food Guide. It’s time to expand that approach more broadly.
If it can’t be stopped, here is another suggestion that would level the playing field: For every dollar they spend on lobbying, the corporate sector must give one dollar to authentic civil society organizations (not those set up and surreptitiously funded by the corporate sector).
In addition, they should fund one delegate from those organizations and one delegate from a low-income country for every delegate they bring.
Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy
