Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

[c1ue]

Money, not environment.

And yet another example of an NGO gone amok.

3 page article, excerpts below

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-835712.html

The WWF has promised to do a lot of good things with the money, like spending it on forests, gorillas, water, the climate -- and, of course, the animal the environmental protection group uses as its emblem, the giant panda.
Governments also entrust a lot of money to the organization. Over the years, the WWF has received a total of $120 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). For a long time, German government ministries were so generous to the organization that the WWF even decided, in the 1990s, to limit the amount of government funding it could receive. The organization was anxious not to be seen as merely an extension of government environmental protection agencies.

...

In Brazil, an agricultural industry executive talked about the first shipload of sustainable soybeans, certified in accordance with WWF standards, to reach Rotterdam last year, amid a flurry of PR hype. The executive had to admit, however, that he wasn't entirely sure where the shipment had come from. In Sumatra, members of a tribal group reported how troops hired by WWF partner Wilmar had destroyed their houses, because they had stood in the way of unfettered palm oil production.

...

The organization, which now takes in about €500 million a year, has certainly notched up some important achievements. The Dutch section of WWF helped pay for Greenpeace's flagship, the Rainbow Warrior. To prevent dam projects on the Danube and Loire Rivers, activists occupied large construction sites, sometimes for years. In the 1980s, the Swiss section fought so vehemently against nuclear energy that the federal police classified its managing director as an enemy of the state.

...

In the early 1970s, with the help of a large donation, it convinced the Indian government under then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to identify protected areas for the threatened big cats. According to Indian estimates, there were more than 4,000 tigers living in the country at the time. Today that number has dwindled to 1,700. Nevertheless, the WWF sees the Indian tiger program as a success. Without its efforts, says a spokesman, India's tigers could "quite possibly be extinct by now."

Less widely publicized is the fact that people were displaced to achieve this success. Villages were "resettled, but not against their will," says Claude Martin, a Swiss national who was general director of WWF International from 1993 to 2005. "We were always convinced that this issue was handled properly." But there are even doubts about that.

About 300,000 families had to leave their homes to create a conservation zone for wild animals, writes Mark Dowie in his book "Conservation Refugees."

...

The Swiss founders and the German zoologist were united by a mixture of conservation and neo-colonialism. This legacy also includes the forced displacement of the Massai nomads from the Serengeti.

Experts estimate that in Africa alone, conservation efforts have created 14 million "conservation refugees" since the colonial era. In this model, some of the indigenous people, if they were lucky enough, could work as park wardens, preventing their relatives from entering the protected zones.

...

The WWF sees its work in Sumatra as an important achievement, arguing that the rainforest in the Tesso Nilo was successfully saved as a result of a "fire department approach." In reality, the conservation zone has grown while the forest inside has become smaller. Companies like Asia Pacific Resources International, with which the WWF previously had a cooperative arrangement, cut down the virgin forest, says Sunarto.

His colleague Ruswantu takes affluent eco-tourists on tours of the park on the backs of tamed elephants. The area is off-limits for the locals, and anti-poaching units funded by the Germans make sure that they stay out. "The WWF is in charge here, and that's a problem," says Bahri, who owns a tiny shop and lives in a village near the entrance to the park. No one knows where the borders are, he says. "We used to have small fields of rubber trees, and suddenly we were no longer allowed to go there."

...

Indonesia is thriving as a result of a boom in palm oil. The Southeast Asian nation accounts for 48 percent of global production. The multifunctional oil is used in biodiesel, food products like Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread, shampoo and skin lotion. But the heavy use of pesticides on the monocultures is polluting rivers and ground water. Slash-and-burn agriculture has turned Indonesia into one of the world's largest emitters of CO2.

Despite claims of sustainability, many companies continue to deforest the area. A concession costs about $30,000 in bribes or campaign contributions, reports a former WWF employee who worked in Indonesia for a long time. "Sustainable palm oil, as the WWF promises with its RSPO certificates, is really nonexistent," he says.

...

The organization launched the RSPO initiative in 2004, together with companies like Unilever, which processes 1.3 million tons of palm oil a year, making it one of the world's largest palm oil processors. Another company involved is Wilmar, one of the world's major palm oil producers.

Wilmar has completed "a transformation," says the WWF's Fleckenstein. She points out that the company has a clear schedule for certification, and that social criteria are taken into account.

...


The WWF headquarters in Gland near Geneva seems solidly green and respectable. Silver plaques there commemorate the people to whom the organization owes a great debt: the "Members of The 1001." This elite group of undisclosed financiers was created in 1971 to provide financial backing for the organization.
To this day, the WWF does not like to disclose the names of the donors, probably because some of those appearing on the club's list would not exactly help their image -- people like arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and former Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

...

In a secret operation, big game hunter Prince Bernhard and John Hanks, the WWF's Africa director, hired mercenaries to break up the illegal trade in rhinoceros horn. But members of the South African military, seen as the biggest horn dealers at the time, infiltrated the group.

...

John Hanks, still a member of the board of trustees, is in charge of giant cross-border nature parks in Africa today. The projects are called Peace Parks, and yet they are responsible for a great deal of strife. The German government donated about €200,000 to the WWF for so-called Peace Park dialogues in South Africa. One of the outcomes was that corridors were necessary for the Peace Parks -- as was the relocation of local residents, who are putting up a fight.

Germany's KfW development agency is even prepared to contribute €20 million for new corridors at the Kaza national park, another major WWF project. "For each euro from the WWF, at least five more are provided by governments," estimates WWF's Martina Fleckenstein. The organization seems to have enormous political influence.
Hunting is now permitted in the massive new parks. Spanish King Juan Carlos, for example, was recently in the news after he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana. Juan Carlos is the honorary president of WWF Spain, which many find outrageous. In Namibia alone, the WWF has permitted trophy hunting in 38 conservation areas.

Rich Europeans or Americans are allowed to behave as if the colonial period had never ended. They are allowed to shoot elephants, buffalo, leopards, lions, giraffes and zebras, and they can even smear the blood of the dead animals onto their faces, in accordance with an old custom. A WWF spokesman defends this practice, saying that quotas have been established, and that the proceeds from this "regulated hunting" can contribute to conservation.

...

The German branch of WWF, officially opposed to genetic engineering, ensured that those who support it were also welcome at the round table. The Germans even paid the travel expenses for representatives of the Argentine branch of the WWF, which was long run by a man with ties to the former military junta and an agricultural industrialist. No one at the round table was interested in the fact that the WWF, together with Swiss retailers, had already unveiled a stricter soybean standard a long time previously.

Undermining Itself

Undermining its own standards seems to be a specialty of the WWF. In fact, it is this flexibility that brings the organization millions in donations from industry. In the case of soybeans, the group attending the round table meeting negotiated and negotiated. It softened some standards and made some concessions, and then, finally, the first 85,000 tons of RTRS soybeans arrived in Rotterdam last June. "It was a success," says biologist Fleckenstein, noting that the WWF had examined the soybeans carefully. "We were especially pleased that this product was genetically unmodified." The soybeans had come from two giant farms owned by the Brazilian Maggi family.

...

Blairo Maggi became the governor of the state, and in 2005 Greenpeace presented him with its "Golden Chainsaw" award. In no other Brazilian state was as much virgin forest cut down as in Maggi's soybean republic. The areas now occupied by his RTRS model farms were cleared only a few years ago. According to RTRS, the two farms are the only suppliers of the 85,000 tons of certified soybeans that arrived in Rotterdam in June.

The only problem is that nothing on the Maggi farms is genetically unmodified.

Satisfying European Demand

A white tank, 10 meters tall and with a capacity of thousands of liters, stands in the shade of a warehouse at the Fazenda Tucunaré farm. The tank is labeled "Glifosato," the Portuguese word for the herbicide glyphosate. The buildings housing the workers are only a few hundred meters away. Behind a fence, there are ditches full of foul-smelling water with a green, shimmering surface. Next to the ditches is a depot where signs with skulls on them warn: "Caution. Highly Toxic!"

Glyphosate is popular as an herbicide for genetically manipulated soybeans, because the plant is resistant to the agent, which kills weeds. Despite a growing number of critical studies showing, for example, that the agent causes reproductive problems in animals, the RTRS system permits its use.

Other pesticides are also not a problem for RTRS, which merely asks that they be "used sensibly," says João Shimada, the sustainability manager at Grupo Maggi. It isn't so easy to explain what happened with the 85,000 tons of soybeans, he says. "In truth, we provided those soybeans to satisfy demand coming from Europe." Since then, companies like Unilever have boasted about using sustainable soybeans. In reality, no more than 8,000 tons came from the two farms.

"I don't know where the other 77,000 tons came from, either," says Shimada.

Simply disgusting.

It seems quite clear that the WWF is all about preserving nature for the 1%, so that the 1% can shoot it and smear blood on their faces or greenwash big ag products into Europe.

[Mega]

Re: Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

"Funny" that everytime a small 3rd World nation starts to pull itself out of the IMF mire the WWF finds something "Wrong". The WWF trying to stop Mexico hydro-eletric dam project because it might harm breeding of Vampire bats. Or the WWF kicking off at Brazil over the Rainforrest.

15 Years ago we were told that an area the size of Wales was lost every year to loging/farming (how dare they!)......by now ALL of South America should be bear.......

Even as a kid i recall Brazil & two other nations on its borders did a massive Hydro eletric dam project.....everytime i switched on the TV the BBC news was pouring on the scorn......."It damaged the river basin"......"It didn't make econmic sense"....."Not enough demand for the power".....

The West will use every low down buls!t trick to try to keep these nations under their thumb..........Roll on the BRICS !

[don]

Re: Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

adding a pinch of confusion . . . from the neighbor next door

By GARY TAUBES

Oakland, Calif.

THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.

While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.

And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.

The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”

This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”

[jabberwocky]

Re: Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

It is interesting to note Business Week's (Bloomberg) write up of a GS'er, Tercek, leading the "Nature Conservancy". What a surprise!
Is there anywhere that the money funnel isn't probing? I suppose if things turn out badly, GS and JPM can finance a hostile takeover of China, securitize the debt, and rehypothecate it through London, and buy out Europe. No problems!!!

[charliebrown]

Re: Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

I live on a small creek, that connects two major forest preserves. About 10 years ago, an undeveloped parcel of about 50 acres was going to be clear cut to put a big box store on it.
There were many things that "stunk" about the project.

Some of them was that the town's own building an planning commission did not think a big box store was right for the site due to the proximity of schools, and already overly congested roads. Also down stream from the project was prone to flooding during major rains, and the 50 acre site was a good baffle to stop heavy rains from just washing down the creek. But the city council ignored their own planning commission and moved on, seduced by the lure of over promised tax dollars.

The building site is an excellent example of old growth eastern woodlands ecosystem. It was not a former corn field. It also contained the above mentioned creek, and is a corridor to migration of deer, coyotes, and other wild life. There are scores of 100+ year old red oak trees on it.

I decided to try and save this parcel from the bull dozers. I went to the council meetings and petitioned the forest preserve district to add this parcel to the forest preserve. I also thought to call some to the big name conservation groups and see what they could do for me. I though I could get a bus load of protestors and media time to embarass the city council into not going ahead.

In my conversations with the big enviro groups, I got the impression that they were purely lobbey groups with their actors working in washington and springfield il. They could do nothing for me.


You will be happy to know that a small coalition of us on the creek were able to alert the citizens and have them petition the forest preserve district and they bought the property, and it is know known as belleau woods south unit.

[ER59]

Re: Der Spiegel on the WWF - Green Veneer: the Myth of Sustainability

You will be happy to know that a small coalition of us on the creek were able to alert the citizens and have them petition the forest preserve district and they bought the property, and it is know known as belleau woods south unit.

Thank you for posting this!