(fwd) McDonald's Report on Corporate Social Responsibility

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http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/features/feature_template.cfm?ID=820

 

By Paul Hawken

The April 14th McDonald's Report on Corporate Social Responsibility

http://www.mcdonalds.com/corporate/social/report/index.html

is a low water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of

corporate social responsibility. It is a melange of homilies, generalities,

and soft assurances that do not provide hard metrics of the company, its

activities, or its impacts on society and the environment. While movements

towards transparency and disclosure are to be applauded, there is little of

either in the report. That their report is based on the Global Reporting

Initiative (GRIs) calls to question whether the GRIs have anything to do

with the concept of sustainability or true

corporate responsibility.

 

This is not a report about stakeholder rights as they would have one

believe. It is a report about how a corporation that has been severely stung

by bad publicity and declining earnings now wants to plead its case to its

critics. It states that those NGOs that continue to criticize just don't

want to make things better while ignoring what their critics are most

concerned about.

 

The McDonald's Social Responsibility Report is like Ronald McDonald-a

fantasy. It presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of

restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food that is produced by an

agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization and

destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability. As the

founder of The Natural Step (TNS) in the United States, I can say that

nothing could be further from the idea of sustainability than the McDonald's

Corporation.

 

The Report states that " being a socially responsible leader [their

self-appointed term] begins a process that involves more awareness on the

issues that will make a difference. " McDonald's has known for decades that

the food it serves harms people, promotes obesity, heart disease, and has

detrimental effects on land and water. Addressing that one issue would make

a difference. They have known about the detrimental effects of their food

just as the tobacco companies understood the impact of their products. Yet

they have done little to modify their menu. In the arena of social equity,

McDonald's has resisted from its inception all attempts to organize its

workers, and through industry trade organizations has consistently and

intensely lobbied against raises in the minimum wage. To say McDonald's has

actively worked to crush trade unions is an understatement.

 

It is good to see ideas about materials and reduced waste being promoted by

corporate actors. But it is equally important to note that corporations who

do that only have not changed in any major respect and may be using these

superficial changes to avoid deeper structural issues that do address

sustainability. Essentially, if corporations can make more money by using

less stuff, less waste, less pollution, so much the better. But the nature

of their corporate activity has not changed and that is certainly the case

for McDonald's.

 

For years it has promoted and demanded the least expensive standardized food

for its chains. In so doing it has created powerful incentives for the

centralization of food processing, agribusiness, and long supply lines, all

of which reduce American food security. For McDonald's to announce that it

now wants to have antibiotic free chickens is a slap in the face to the

thousands of small poultry farmers who could not compete and were forced out

of business by the agri-corporations that introduced the very industrial

chicken practices that required antibiotics to avoid massive die-off of

their flocks. Simply stated, standardized food destroys agricultural and

biological diversity. Nothing could be more antithetical to the recovery of

overstressed farmlands than fast food.

 

At this juncture in our history, as companies and governments turn their

attention to sustainability, it is critical that the meaning of

sustainability not get lost in the trappings of corporate speak. There is a

growing worldwide movement towards corporate responsibility and

sustainability, led in many cases by companies whose history and products

have brought damage and suffering to the world. I am concerned that good

housekeeping practices such as recycled hamburger shells will be confused

with creating a just and sustainable world.

 

Transnational corporations such as McDonalds and their associated lobbyists

and trade associations have led efforts to Americanize trade through

representatives at the WTO. They have prevented the strengthening of

environmental and labor laws and they have led the effort to eliminate the

ability of smaller, more vulnerable nations to determine their economic

destiny. In other words, they embrace " sustainability " as long as they can

make money and it doesn't change their overall purpose, which is to grow

faster than the overall world economy and population and increase their

share of the world's economic output to the benefit of small number of

shareholders.

 

The question we have to ask is what is enough? Is it enough that one in five

meals in the US is a fast food meal? Does that satisfy McDonald's? Or do

they want that figure to be one in three, or how about one in two? How about

the developing world? Does McDonald's want to see the rest of the world

drink the equivalent of 550 cans of soda pop as do Americans? Do they think

every third global meal should be comprised of greasy meat, fries, and

caramelized sugar? They won't answer those questions because that is exactly

their corporate mission. They have 29,000 restaurants with nearly 3,000 new

ones added each year.

 

A valid report on sustainability and social responsibility must ask the

question: What if everybody did it? What would be the ecological footprint

of such a company? What is McDonald's footprint now? The report carefully

avoids the corporation's real environmental impacts. It talked about water

use at the outlets, but failed to note that every quarter-pounder requires

600 gallons of water. It talked about recycled paper, but not the

pfisteria-laden waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the

southeast. It talked about energy use in the restaurants, but not in the

unsustainable food system McDonald's relies upon that uses 10 calories of

energy for every calorie of good produced. " Sustaining " McDonald's requires

a simple unsustainable formula: cheap food plus cheap non-unionized labor

plus deceptive advertising = high profits.

 

An honest report would tell stakeholders how much it truly costs society to

support a corporation like McDonald's. It would detail the externalities

borne by other people, places, and generations: The draining of aquifers,

the contaminated waterways, the strip-mined soils, the dangerous abattoirs

where migrant workers are employed, the inhumane, injury-prone dead-end jobs

preparing chicken carcasses for Chicken McNuggets, the global greenhouse

methane gas emitted by the millions of hamburger cows in feedlots, the

impact of their $2 billion advertising and promotional campaigns to convince

young people to demand their food, the ethics of using toys to induce

small children into their restaurants. The list is longer than this. What

the report is short on is candor, transparency and corporate honesty.

++++

Paul Hawken is the author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism.

He is the founder of the Sausalito-based Natural Capital Institute and is on

the advisory board of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

 

 

See a list of issues that McDonald's did not deal with in its Report on

Corporate Social Responsibility:

http://www.foodfirst.org/media/press/

2002/mcdonaldsissues.html

 

Anti-McDonalds' world: This website gets a million hits a month.

http://www.mcspotlight.org/