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Arabica Robusta

The price of fashion's murky supply chains - SciDev.Net - 0 views

www.scidev.net/...aster-murky-supply-chains.html

commodity chain international trade labor globalization anti-corporate marxism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 May 16 - No Cached
  • There has been some backlash to this methodology from luxury brands such as Chanel and Fendi, which fared particularly badly on the index. Chanel replied that the “reality of our actions seems more important to us than any related media coverage”.
  • But, as Moore tells me, this goes against the idea of transparency. Companies should be making clear how — and how far — they monitor supply chains, she explains. Transparency is essential, Moore says, to tackle the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture in the fashion industry.
  • And beyond it, things get considerably worse. “When we started asking to drill down below sewing factories, companies didn’t seem to know,” Moore says. Only two of the surveyed companies published details of second-tier suppliers, which include fabric and yarn mills. And more than half published no details of monitoring processes for raw materials such as cotton.
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  • Cotton production can involve large-scale pesticide and water use, and human rights abuses such as the use of child labour. Production of the textile fibre rayon can cause deforestation.
Arabica Robusta

How The World Bank Is Financing Environmental Destruction - 0 views

projects.huffingtonpost.com/...environmental-destruction-peru

exploitation movements social responsibility gold conga peru

shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The World Bank Group finances economic development projects in poor, often unstable countries in pursuit of a lofty ambition: ending global poverty. Borrowers that accept a loan from the World Bank, which lends to governments, or the IFC, which lends to companies, must follow detailed rules for protecting people and the environment, under an approach they describe as “do no harm.”
  • From 2009 to 2013, the two lenders pumped $50 billion into 239 of these high-risk “Category A” projects, including dams, copper mines and oil pipelines — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span, records show. Much of the development is in countries like Peru, where federal governments are weak and regulations are lax.
  • Miners dig titanic pits and move truckloads of rock into piles higher than many office buildings. They then spray the mounds with a cyanide wash. The cyanide bonds to tiny specks of gold ore and seeps down to a pad. The solution is pumped to a mill, then refined and processed into gold bars.
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  • In Peru, the IFC put up $23 million to build Yanacocha beginning in 1993, and then financed an expansion six years later. The IFC also holds a 5 percent ownership stake in the mine. (Newmont is the majority owner, with a 51 percent stake. Buenaventura, a Peruvian partner, owns the remaining shares.)
  • “The gold they take out of our region is stained with blood,” said Milton Sánchez, a leader of the protest movement. “Foreigners wear it on their ears, neck and fingers to look good, but their vanity is at the expense of our suffering. We’ve seen destruction of the culture and environment. Our families are being torn apart.”
  • Newmont, based in Denver, first identified a rich, untapped vein of ore deposits in the hills above the town in 1986. Raising money to finance a mine proved a challenge. Shining Path, a violent insurgent group, had traumatized the country. Foreign banks and companies were reluctant to invest in Peru. Newmont turned to the IFC, which specializes in lending in places where other banks are afraid to go. In the early 1990s, Yanacocha agents traveled deep into the Andes, buying up property. Many sellers, poor and illiterate, say they did not realize that there was huge wealth locked in the rock under their fields. Others claim their neighbors illegally sold land out from under them.
  • Throughout this period, Yanacocha downplayed the risks of the mercury spill and water pollution. But behind the scenes, executives at its parent, Newmont, worried about the stream of negative publicity surrounding one of their biggest investments. Larry Kurlander, a Newmont senior vice president, was dispatched after the mercury spill to audit the mine. What he found alarmed him. The farmers were right to worry, Kurlander discovered, according to documents obtained as part of a 2005 Frontline and New York Times investigation. He warned senior Newmont officials that the company had violated environmental regulations on a huge scale, and that the abuses he discovered were so bad that senior management was at risk of “criminal prosecution or imprisonment.” “We are in non-compliance with our operating permits … and that non-compliance occurs virtually 100% of the time,” he wrote. Kurlander, who is retired, did not respond to phone messages left at his home.
  • The shootings made international news, and in Peru they were greeted with widespread condemnation. In the aftermath, Newmont suspended the Conga project indefinitely. Later that year, the company took the unusual step of issuing a formal apology for past actions. “We are not proud of the current state of our relationship with the people of Cajamarca,” company executives wrote in December 2012. “We want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the mistakes we have made in how we conducted ourselves and conducted business.”
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