Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 33

         GOVERNANCE IN THE CORPORATE INTEREST

   The world's major transnational corporations have had a highly influential insider role in GATT negotiations and are similarly active in the WTO. They are especially well represented in the U.S. delegation, which has had a pivotal role in shaping the GATT agreements. The key to this corporate access is the U.S Trade Act of 1974, which provides for a system of trade advisory committees to bring a public perspective to U.S. trade negotiations. The trade committees are supposed to conform to the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, which sets guidelines for the membership of all such federal advisory committees. These include a requirement that public representation must be "fairly balanced in terms of points of view represented ad the functions to be performed by the advisory committee." Advisory committee processes are also required to be open to public scrutiny. 
   The U.S. trade representative's office has chosen to define this requirement to mean only that the advisory committee membership must represent all of the business community with regard to "balance  among sectors, product lines, between small and large firms, among geographical areas, and among demographic groups." A study by Citizen's Congress Watch released in December 1991 found that of 111 members of the three main trade advisory committees, only two represented labor unions. An approved seat for an environmental advocacy organization had not been filled, and there were no consumer representatives. The trade panels rarely announced their meetings to the public and never allowed the public to attend.
   The corporate interest, however, was well represented. The study found that ninety-two members of the three committees represented individual companies, and sixteen represented trade industry associations, ten of them from the chemical industry. Members of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, the most important of the panels, included such corporate giants as IBM, AT & T, Bethlehem Steel, Time Warner, 3M, Corning, BankAmerica, American Express, Scott Paper, Dow Chemical, Boeing, Eastman Kodak, Mobil, Amoco, Pfizer, Hewlett Packard, Weyerhaeuser, and General Motors ---all of which were also members of the U.S. Business Roundtable. Of all the corporate members all but General Motors were represented either by the chairman of the board or the president, in most instances, whichever of these officers functioned as CEO. According to Public Citizen's Congress Watch : 

     Advisory committees are so intertwined with governmental trade negotiators that panel members require security clearances. One of the perks of membership is a special reading room filled with classified documents available for perusal by nongovernmental advisors. To enable trade advisors' opinions regarding the current GATT talks to reach negotiators more quickly, a database has been established that instantly puts an advisory committee member's words at the negotiators' fingertips. Government sponsors of the trade advisory system take enormous trouble to keep trade advisors fully informed of every twist and turn in the negotiating process. Despite their enormous influence, the corporate trade counselors work in near total obscurity. 

   A 1989 Department of Commerce document described the involvement of advisory committee members in the 1979 Tokyo round of GATT :

     The advisory members spent long hours in Washington consulting directly with negotiators on key issues and reviewing the actual texts of proposed agreements. For the most part, government negotiators followed the advice of the advisory committee. . . Whenever advice was not followed, the government informed the committees of the reasons it was not possible to utilize their recommendations. 

   Of the ninety-two corporations represented on the three trade advisory panels, twenty-seven companies or their affiliates had been assessed fines by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) totaling more than $12.1 million between 1980 and 1990 for failure to comply with existing environmental regulations. Five --- DuPont, Monsanto, 3M, General Motors, and Eastman Kodak---made the EPA's top ten list of hazardous waste dischargers. Twenty-nine of the member companies or their affiliates had collectively contributed more than $800,000 in a failed attempt to defeat California's Safe Drinking Water and Toxics Enforcement Act, a statewide initiative to require accurate labeling on potentially cancer-causing products and to limit toxic discharges into drinking water. Twenty-nine had put up over $2.1 million in a successful bid to defeat another California initiative called Big Green, which, among other provisions, would have set tighter standards for the discharge of toxic chemicals. 
   Clayton Yeutter, in his capacity as U.S. secretary of agriculture under George Bush, stated publicly that one of his main goals was to use GATT to overturn strict local and state food safety regulations. He rationalized, "If the rest of the world can agree on what the standard ought to be on a given product, maybe the U.S. or EC will have to admit that they were wrong when their standards differ."
   The WTO uses the global health and safety standards for food set by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, or Codex. Codex is an intergovernmental body established in 1963 and run jointly by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish international standards on pesticide residues, additives, veterinary drug residues, and labeling. Critics of Codex observe that it is heavily influenced by industry and has tended to harmonize standards downward. For example, a Greenpeace USA study found that Codex safety levels for at least eight widely used pesticides were lower than current U.S. standards by as much as a factor of twenty-five. The Codex standards allow DDT residues up to fifty times those permitted under U.S. law.
   Governmental delegations to Codex routinely include nongovernmental representatives, but they are chosen almost exclusively from industry. One hundred forty of the world's largest multinational food and agrochemical companies participated in Codex meetings held between 1989 and 1991. Of a total of 2,587 individual participants, only twenty-six came from public-interest groups. Nestle, the world's largest food company, had thirty-eight representatives. A Nestle spokesperson explained,"It seems to me that governments are more likely to find qualified people in companies than among the self-appointed ayatollahs of the food sector."