The environment in the news

Financial Times (UK):Retailers to ‘face scrutiny over workers’

By FT Reporters

18 June 2006

The high street will become the new battleground in the fight for improved labour standards, one of the world’s leading auditors of working practices has warned.

While campaigners’ pressure on sporting goods companies had paid off, retailers had only recently come under scrutiny and many were a long way from closely monitoring the working conditions in their suppliers’ factories, Auret van Heerden, president of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), told the FT.

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“There are very big high-street names that are doing nothing, no due diligence, nothing,” he said. “The food question is also coming – you look at the agricultural supply chain and there are big problems there.”

Mr van Heerden said the FLA’s audits still found an average of 18 violations per factory it visited. All visits are unannounced and last about 10 days, with companies having to deal with issues identified.

The main problems it encountered conducting audits in Asian countries such as China and Thailand were related to working hours and wages, with few factories willing to do something different from competitors, he said.

“Our biggest problem is that governments aren’t enforcing their own rules. So we are trying to force multinational companies to pick up the ball that the governments have dropped.”

Several retailers, such as Spain’s Inditex and Germany’s KarstadtQuelle, faced negative publicity last year when a factory building in Bangladesh owned by Spectrum, a supplier, collapsed. Both Inditex and Karstadt have said they would help with compensation for the dozens of dead.

Closer to home, Inditex was accused last month by a Portuguese newspaper of having used suppliers in Portugal which had, in turn, employed child labour. The company investigated the claims within a week and said it had not found signs of child labour.

The speed at which Inditex moved to investigate such allegations reflects the damage that a brand can suffer.

It has, along with retailers such as Levi Strauss, Marks and Spencer, J. Sainsbury and New Look, signed up to the Ethical Trading Initiative – comprising companies, non-governmental organisations and trade unions – whose code does not allow child labour.

Last year social audits themselves came under fire. The Clean Clothes Campaign, a coalition of trade unions and pressure groups that surveyed 670 workers in 40 clothing and sports shoe factories, found that audits were often superficial.

In a recent interview, Achim Steiner, the new executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, called for higher standards in the food and fishery industries. But he praised companies that had agreed to certification – committing them to using or selling only products proven to be environment-friendly.

Reporting by Richard Milne in Kaiserslautern, Hugh Williamson in Berlin and Jenny Wiggins and Elizabeth Rigby in London

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Times of Oman: Desertification could uproot about 135m people: UN chief

MUSCAT — The Sultanate, represented by the Ministry of Regional Municipalities, Environment and Water Resources, today, along with the international community, observes World Day to Combat Desertification, which falls on July 17 every year.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his message on the occasion of World Day to Combat Desertification, warned that if actions to prevent desertification are not taken by 2020, an estimated 135 million people could be placed at risk of being uprooted. The UN General Assembly adopted the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on July 17 in 1992, which was enforced in 1996 and the Sultanate joined the said convention pursuant to the Royal Decree No. 5/96.

Desertification — the loss of the land’s biological productivity in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas — is one of the most serious threats facing humanity.

World Day to Combat Desertification, in this International Year of Deserts and Desertification, is a double reminder of the scope and seriousness of the challenge.

This year’s World Day also has a double theme: ‘The Beauty of Deserts — the Challenge of Desertification’. It reflects the important distinction between deserts as a unique ecosystem on the one hand, and desertification, or the loss of the land’s biological productivity, on the other. It thus serves two distinct purposes — to celebrate the richness and cultural diversity of our deserts, which deserve protection, while highlighting the need to combat desertification as a global sustainable development challenge.

The UNCCD is a major achievement for the international community in terms of combating of desertification, which the international community has long recognised as a major economic, social and environmental problem of concern to many countries in all regions of the world.

In 1977, the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) adopted a Plan of Action for Combating Desertification (PACD). Unfortunately, despite this and other efforts, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concluded in 1991 that the problem of land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas had intensified, although there were “local examples of success”.

As a result, the question of how to tackle desertification was still a major concern for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).

The UNCED conference, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, supported a new, integrated approach to the problem, emphasising action to promote sustainable development at the community level. It also called on the UN General Assembly to establish an Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee (INCD) to prepare, by June 1994, a convention to combat desertification, particularly in Africa. In December 1992, the General Assembly agreed and adopted Resolution No. 47/188.

The devastating consequences of desertification can be seen and felt all over the world. About 3.6 billion of the world’s 5.2 billion hectares of dry land used for agriculture have suffered erosion and soil degradation. Topsoil is painfully slow to form, but can be destroyed terrifyingly fast.

An estimated 24 billion tonnes are blown or washed away each year, meaning it is being lost at least 16 times faster than it can be replaced. As topsoil is destroyed, livelihoods are lost. A fifth of the world’s population is under threat.

The International Year of Deserts and Desertification presents a golden opportunity to convey the message across effectively that desertification is a global problem. It also provides an impulse to strengthen the visibility of the dry lands on the international environmental agenda.

Drought threatens the livelihood of one-fifth of the world’s population in more than 100 countries around the world. Already over 250 million people are directly affected, mainly the poorest, most marginalised and politically weak citizens. The worst hit areas are in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern European nations.

Desertification does not refer to the expansion of existing deserts. It is caused primarily by human activities and climate change. Deforestation, overgrazing and poor irrigation practices all undermine the land’s productivity and exacerbate problems of water scarcity, famine, migration and social breakdown. Combating desertification has become a crucial and urgent issue in fighting poverty and ensuring the long-term productivity of inhabited dry lands.

The Sultanate has since long recognised the impacts of desertification on the agricultural lands. For this, the Ministry of Regional Municipalities, Environment and Water Resources, in cooperation with the Economic and Social Organisation for West Asia and Food and Agriculture Organisation, has set up a plan for combating of desertification, which included establishing an archive for the Sultanate’s natural resources. This is in addition to organising seminars and conferences by the ministry on the issue, and the desertification combating programmes, which are carried out in cooperation with the granting bodies for maintaining technical and financial support for execution of top priority projects in this field. World Day to Combat Desertification is a reminder that desertification is not a fatality. Solutions exist and with collective effort can be put into practice.

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