Submitted by Kwa Ali (not verified) on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 20:08.
The World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF), corporations and modern-day eugenics projects
By Kwa Ali
Resources: http://siteresources.worldbank.org
A detailed study, by the Multinational Monitor in 1990, listed that 29 individuals from the World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF ) board of directors and National Councils were affiliated at the highest rank to corporations such as "Union Carbide, Exxon Chemical Co and Monsanto". In the same year, the WWF director was an ex-president of Exxon Chemical Co, the same company "accused of dumping illegally 2.9 million pounds of toxic material in a 1987 lawsuit". Currently, WWF International president, since 2001, is Chief Emeka Anyaoku , an honorary member of the Club of Rome and the Chairman of the Orient Petroleum board. Previously, he held the position of Secretary General of the British Commonwealth, a servant then of to the Queen Elizabeth of England.
In 2000, WWF signed a 5 year contract worth £3.5 million with Lafarge Aggregates, a French multinational (fined in 1994 and 2008 for boosting profits through a cement cartel). In 2003, Lafarge Aggregates used the partnership with WWF to persuade local communities and environmental organisations on the benefits of the construction of a massive quarry in Harris, Scotland. As a WWF conservation partner, the company was assured: "a unique relationship that [...] enhance brand image and add value to (your) marketing and communications strategy." (Source: WWF Web-site).
Another environmental organisation, Friends of the Earth called for an immediate cessation of such partnership. This was by no means the first WWF illegitimacy crisis as the WWF International's first president was a German-born count, later known as Prince Bernhard of Holland , organiser of the first Bilderberg meeting and linked to Nazis groups (IG Farben, the manufacturer of Zyklon B). In 1976, after the Lockheed bribery scandal and “operation Lock”, Prince Bernhard resigned and was replaced by John H. Loudon, a financial advisor to the Rockefeller Group , a former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell and chairman of Shell Oil Co board. Since its creation, the WWF was funded by the 1001 Club, a club whose members comprise of the establishment with a long list of royal entities, powerful families and members of the business elite, with an entrance member fee, set at $10,000.
The top executive positions at WWF seem to be reserved to those who come directly or have had experience in the corporate world, and more particularly the gas, mining or oil industries. Maurice Strong, first president of CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and adviser to the World Bank Group on environmental matters was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation- which funded the first UN Earth Summit in 1972- over which he presided. He was working for Stronat, owner of ProChemCo and AZL (conglomerate with ventures in land, gas and oil, lead also by Adnan Khashoggi) when he became the Vice President of WWF Canada in the 1970's.
A strange event occurred in 2007 at the WWF office in Toronto, Canada which was investigated by the Medias and the police with great care to tell the "obvious facts" and hide the "crucial facts". In 2007, Glen Davis, one of the wealthiest and largest donor to WWF was murdered at the basement of a garage, after a meeting. Glen Davis, a heir to a Canadian mining giant (NM Davis corporation), had joined WWF in the early 1980's and was sitting at the WWF-Canada board along with representatives from Manitou Investments, AGF Management, Catalyst Paper Corp, JP Morgan (big players in the banking and resource extraction industries) at the time of his death. His assassination has been linked to the trial of another Canadian (and ex-British lord) millionaire, Conrad Black, an ex-associate of his father Neil Davis from whom he had inherited.
Recently, in January 2008, with very little inquisition from fellow environmental and conservation organisations; George Bourne brought his experience as an ex-senior executive to British Petroleum (BP) to WWF Australia. The relationship between WWF and oil companies (and the mining industry) is a close and durable one; Chevron made a very public donation of $ 4 million to WWF while the company was extracting oil in Papua New Guinea in 1999. These oil developments operations provoked much anger and criticism from the local population. By 2000, reports pointed to negative environmental and social spillages; corruption cases of officials linked to pressures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group on the Government of Papua New Guinea to exchange natural resources for the repayment of the debt. Also, leaked documents from Chevron, during its oil drilling deals, facilitated by World Bank loans, stated "WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism".
Deals such as the one WWF made with Chevron, American Express, Inco Limited (tar extracting company), Canon and Unilever (the Marine Stewardship Council), CitiGroup, Kodak, Bank of America, DuPont (manufacturer of chemical products, with "a record of pollution, communities sickness and workers hazards"); are seen by multinationals as a cheap form of advertising as those "donations" to non-profit organisations are tax-exempt. Furthermore, this "cover-up" strategy by multinationals is part of a long list of image control tactics such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which perpetuates profits but with less negative public scrutiny.
This attention to public criticism serves also as a diversion from the root problems; the development of economies of scale and its consequences on the environment, the ever-increasing concentration of corporate power in the hands of fewer companies, namely economic globalisation.
Recent examples of such "image control tactics" through the use of Non Governmental Organisations have been largely developed for the "eco-friendly" stamps on products, certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Round Table for Sustainable Soy (RTSS). The RSPO and RSS agendas are controlled by companies among which, some have a record violation of human rights for the control of large lands by the expulsion of local indigenous communities, price fixing and tax evasions (e.g. Cargill) . The participation of WWF in all the Roundtables was heavily criticized by more than 100 organisations who rejected the farce of certifications schemes, with no enforcement or compliance mechanisms to environmental and societal behavioural change for those multinationals causing deforestations, rural migrations and the loss of biodiversity.
In 2006, the WWF board of the trustees was made up by representatives of telecom and Public Relations companies, investment banks, British tourism authorities, ex-officers of the British army, British intelligence officers and companies linked to Group 4. Group 4 is also known by grass-roots environmental organisations as the British private security firm- working on behalf of powerful arm dealers- to stop criticism by spying on activists.
Hence, WWF does not only serve as "the green card" for multinationals but it serves also as an intermediary between government’s officials and those companies in the North interested in gathering intelligence for investment plans (oil drilling, tourism or mining) in the South.
In present days, WWF is present all over the world with offices in 100 countries. Among the 2000 current projects, one is in the biosphere of Luki (Congo) with the partnership of the Belgian Cooperation, WWF-Belgium is making an evaluation and plan to implement a project for the exploitation of those reserves; which multinational will partnership for socially and environmentally damaging activities in Luki ? At the same time, WWF-Belgium in Congo is also accessing environmental/socio-economic indicators and promoting eco-tourism.
When we go back to the creation of the World Wildlife Fund, we do not see the infamous Prince Bernhard but a biologist, known by the common public as the brother of Aldous Huxley and less known as an eminent Darwinist and eugenicist scientific who worked as a scientific adviser in the colonies of East Africa of the British empire in the 1930's.
Before creating the WWF with fellow conservationists, Julian Huxley saw into the creation of national parks in Kenya, used for tourists and stole from the tribal communities. A member of the British Eugenics Society , he had previously studied the importance of non-human settlements for the need of animal conservation habitats and made often the less than "humanist" aphorism: "no-one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ-plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?"
Population growth has been decried as a problem through its pressure on land, by WWF, since its inception. This recurrent theme of WWF (a reminder, perhaps, of its eugenicist creator) serves for the purpose of the construction of protected "natural parks", designed for foreign tourists and implemented though massive expulsions of local communities, for the great interests of the mining, gas, oil and tourism industries.
With the great efforts of a conservation group such as WWF allied with price-fixing multinationals, the problem of over-consumption of the world poor who "are reproducing too fast" will be resolved through the rise of prices of food commodities and environmental standards will be set through roundtables to commercialise green energies such as biofuels. (continued quote: "Therefore... they [the poors] must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation." (Julian Huxley, Man in the modern world,1947)
The latest alliance of WWF with multinationals against the needs of the communities in the South has been expressed in its endorsement for “biofuels”. With a similar viewpoint, the UN and World Bank experts called for Third World countries to seek into the opportunities of economic development through “biofuels”, as a way of reviving their moribund agricultural sector, before denouncing in a convenient and timely manner the danger of such investments amid world food riots .
Between the first meeting of UNCTAD (United Nations Conferences on Trade And Development) on "partnership for development of the international community", the "Biofuels Initiative" in 2005, sponsored by UNICA (Sugar Cane Industry Union) and the Convention on Biological diversity in 2008; the number of people, in the world, dying of hunger or malnutrition increased from 17 million in 1978 (0.3% of world population) to the predicted 150 million for 2008 (2.2% of world population).
Global food crisis are not a new phenomenon, solely linked to the transformation of food crops into fuel, but have been linked since the 1970's to the integration of world food markets in one market; in which small poor farmers in the South have to compete with the subsidized rich farmers of the North. The current trade system is at the roots of the continuing impoverishment of southern countries; as the system is dictated in the North by corporations against the needs of the common people. As a former WTO official described the institution: “This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups”.
In going in line with the interests of transnational companies, WWF USA gave its unequivocal support to the North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA). This is the same agreement that brought hunger, epitomized during the “Tortilla crisis” to Mexico, important job losses in both the US and Mexican camp.
In “Green politics and the Global Trade: NAFTA and the future of environment”, author John Audley gives an account on the access to institutions (US highest official positions) and the presence at the signature of NAFTA of United States Trade Representatives (USTR) advisors and WWF trustee founder of the WWF Russell E.Train and Kathryn Fuller, president of WWF (1989-2005), also a former USTR and current director of Alcoa.Inc. To know this particular point, explains the incapacity of the WWF to denounce the World Trade regime and its free-trade acolytes, causing global warming by repeatedly banning the practise of environmental policies, seen as barriers to trade.
It is then urgent to ask WWF for whom the organisation works: the business elite? On which grounds can the conservation organisation claim to defend the environment when it is in partnership with the biggest polluters in the world? Can a Not-for-Profit organisation run a budget surplus of more than US$100 million (accounts are protected by the banking secret as the WWF headquarter is in Switzerland) and still call itself a Non-Profit organisation? Can, we, the defenders of social justice let an organisation linked with so many corporate and elite interests control and operate in such a vast areas of lands in the Third World, as a defender of neo-colonialists and eugenicists projects?
The (WWF), corporations and modern-day eugenics projects
The World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF), corporations and modern-day eugenics projects
By Kwa Ali
Resources: http://siteresources.worldbank.org
A detailed study, by the Multinational Monitor in 1990, listed that 29 individuals from the World Wild Fund For Nature (WWF ) board of directors and National Councils were affiliated at the highest rank to corporations such as "Union Carbide, Exxon Chemical Co and Monsanto". In the same year, the WWF director was an ex-president of Exxon Chemical Co, the same company "accused of dumping illegally 2.9 million pounds of toxic material in a 1987 lawsuit". Currently, WWF International president, since 2001, is Chief Emeka Anyaoku , an honorary member of the Club of Rome and the Chairman of the Orient Petroleum board. Previously, he held the position of Secretary General of the British Commonwealth, a servant then of to the Queen Elizabeth of England.
In 2000, WWF signed a 5 year contract worth £3.5 million with Lafarge Aggregates, a French multinational (fined in 1994 and 2008 for boosting profits through a cement cartel). In 2003, Lafarge Aggregates used the partnership with WWF to persuade local communities and environmental organisations on the benefits of the construction of a massive quarry in Harris, Scotland. As a WWF conservation partner, the company was assured: "a unique relationship that [...] enhance brand image and add value to (your) marketing and communications strategy." (Source: WWF Web-site).
Another environmental organisation, Friends of the Earth called for an immediate cessation of such partnership. This was by no means the first WWF illegitimacy crisis as the WWF International's first president was a German-born count, later known as Prince Bernhard of Holland , organiser of the first Bilderberg meeting and linked to Nazis groups (IG Farben, the manufacturer of Zyklon B). In 1976, after the Lockheed bribery scandal and “operation Lock”, Prince Bernhard resigned and was replaced by John H. Loudon, a financial advisor to the Rockefeller Group , a former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell and chairman of Shell Oil Co board. Since its creation, the WWF was funded by the 1001 Club, a club whose members comprise of the establishment with a long list of royal entities, powerful families and members of the business elite, with an entrance member fee, set at $10,000.
The top executive positions at WWF seem to be reserved to those who come directly or have had experience in the corporate world, and more particularly the gas, mining or oil industries. Maurice Strong, first president of CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and adviser to the World Bank Group on environmental matters was also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation- which funded the first UN Earth Summit in 1972- over which he presided. He was working for Stronat, owner of ProChemCo and AZL (conglomerate with ventures in land, gas and oil, lead also by Adnan Khashoggi) when he became the Vice President of WWF Canada in the 1970's.
A strange event occurred in 2007 at the WWF office in Toronto, Canada which was investigated by the Medias and the police with great care to tell the "obvious facts" and hide the "crucial facts". In 2007, Glen Davis, one of the wealthiest and largest donor to WWF was murdered at the basement of a garage, after a meeting. Glen Davis, a heir to a Canadian mining giant (NM Davis corporation), had joined WWF in the early 1980's and was sitting at the WWF-Canada board along with representatives from Manitou Investments, AGF Management, Catalyst Paper Corp, JP Morgan (big players in the banking and resource extraction industries) at the time of his death. His assassination has been linked to the trial of another Canadian (and ex-British lord) millionaire, Conrad Black, an ex-associate of his father Neil Davis from whom he had inherited.
Recently, in January 2008, with very little inquisition from fellow environmental and conservation organisations; George Bourne brought his experience as an ex-senior executive to British Petroleum (BP) to WWF Australia. The relationship between WWF and oil companies (and the mining industry) is a close and durable one; Chevron made a very public donation of $ 4 million to WWF while the company was extracting oil in Papua New Guinea in 1999. These oil developments operations provoked much anger and criticism from the local population. By 2000, reports pointed to negative environmental and social spillages; corruption cases of officials linked to pressures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group on the Government of Papua New Guinea to exchange natural resources for the repayment of the debt. Also, leaked documents from Chevron, during its oil drilling deals, facilitated by World Bank loans, stated "WWF will act as a buffer for the joint venture against environmentally damaging activities in the region, and against international environmental criticism".
Deals such as the one WWF made with Chevron, American Express, Inco Limited (tar extracting company), Canon and Unilever (the Marine Stewardship Council), CitiGroup, Kodak, Bank of America, DuPont (manufacturer of chemical products, with "a record of pollution, communities sickness and workers hazards"); are seen by multinationals as a cheap form of advertising as those "donations" to non-profit organisations are tax-exempt. Furthermore, this "cover-up" strategy by multinationals is part of a long list of image control tactics such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which perpetuates profits but with less negative public scrutiny.
This attention to public criticism serves also as a diversion from the root problems; the development of economies of scale and its consequences on the environment, the ever-increasing concentration of corporate power in the hands of fewer companies, namely economic globalisation.
Recent examples of such "image control tactics" through the use of Non Governmental Organisations have been largely developed for the "eco-friendly" stamps on products, certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Round Table for Sustainable Soy (RTSS). The RSPO and RSS agendas are controlled by companies among which, some have a record violation of human rights for the control of large lands by the expulsion of local indigenous communities, price fixing and tax evasions (e.g. Cargill) . The participation of WWF in all the Roundtables was heavily criticized by more than 100 organisations who rejected the farce of certifications schemes, with no enforcement or compliance mechanisms to environmental and societal behavioural change for those multinationals causing deforestations, rural migrations and the loss of biodiversity.
In 2006, the WWF board of the trustees was made up by representatives of telecom and Public Relations companies, investment banks, British tourism authorities, ex-officers of the British army, British intelligence officers and companies linked to Group 4. Group 4 is also known by grass-roots environmental organisations as the British private security firm- working on behalf of powerful arm dealers- to stop criticism by spying on activists.
Hence, WWF does not only serve as "the green card" for multinationals but it serves also as an intermediary between government’s officials and those companies in the North interested in gathering intelligence for investment plans (oil drilling, tourism or mining) in the South.
In present days, WWF is present all over the world with offices in 100 countries. Among the 2000 current projects, one is in the biosphere of Luki (Congo) with the partnership of the Belgian Cooperation, WWF-Belgium is making an evaluation and plan to implement a project for the exploitation of those reserves; which multinational will partnership for socially and environmentally damaging activities in Luki ? At the same time, WWF-Belgium in Congo is also accessing environmental/socio-economic indicators and promoting eco-tourism.
When we go back to the creation of the World Wildlife Fund, we do not see the infamous Prince Bernhard but a biologist, known by the common public as the brother of Aldous Huxley and less known as an eminent Darwinist and eugenicist scientific who worked as a scientific adviser in the colonies of East Africa of the British empire in the 1930's.
Before creating the WWF with fellow conservationists, Julian Huxley saw into the creation of national parks in Kenya, used for tourists and stole from the tribal communities. A member of the British Eugenics Society , he had previously studied the importance of non-human settlements for the need of animal conservation habitats and made often the less than "humanist" aphorism: "no-one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ-plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?"
Population growth has been decried as a problem through its pressure on land, by WWF, since its inception. This recurrent theme of WWF (a reminder, perhaps, of its eugenicist creator) serves for the purpose of the construction of protected "natural parks", designed for foreign tourists and implemented though massive expulsions of local communities, for the great interests of the mining, gas, oil and tourism industries.
With the great efforts of a conservation group such as WWF allied with price-fixing multinationals, the problem of over-consumption of the world poor who "are reproducing too fast" will be resolved through the rise of prices of food commodities and environmental standards will be set through roundtables to commercialise green energies such as biofuels. (continued quote: "Therefore... they [the poors] must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation." (Julian Huxley, Man in the modern world,1947)
The latest alliance of WWF with multinationals against the needs of the communities in the South has been expressed in its endorsement for “biofuels”. With a similar viewpoint, the UN and World Bank experts called for Third World countries to seek into the opportunities of economic development through “biofuels”, as a way of reviving their moribund agricultural sector, before denouncing in a convenient and timely manner the danger of such investments amid world food riots .
Between the first meeting of UNCTAD (United Nations Conferences on Trade And Development) on "partnership for development of the international community", the "Biofuels Initiative" in 2005, sponsored by UNICA (Sugar Cane Industry Union) and the Convention on Biological diversity in 2008; the number of people, in the world, dying of hunger or malnutrition increased from 17 million in 1978 (0.3% of world population) to the predicted 150 million for 2008 (2.2% of world population).
Global food crisis are not a new phenomenon, solely linked to the transformation of food crops into fuel, but have been linked since the 1970's to the integration of world food markets in one market; in which small poor farmers in the South have to compete with the subsidized rich farmers of the North. The current trade system is at the roots of the continuing impoverishment of southern countries; as the system is dictated in the North by corporations against the needs of the common people. As a former WTO official described the institution: “This is the place where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups”.
In going in line with the interests of transnational companies, WWF USA gave its unequivocal support to the North American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA). This is the same agreement that brought hunger, epitomized during the “Tortilla crisis” to Mexico, important job losses in both the US and Mexican camp.
In “Green politics and the Global Trade: NAFTA and the future of environment”, author John Audley gives an account on the access to institutions (US highest official positions) and the presence at the signature of NAFTA of United States Trade Representatives (USTR) advisors and WWF trustee founder of the WWF Russell E.Train and Kathryn Fuller, president of WWF (1989-2005), also a former USTR and current director of Alcoa.Inc. To know this particular point, explains the incapacity of the WWF to denounce the World Trade regime and its free-trade acolytes, causing global warming by repeatedly banning the practise of environmental policies, seen as barriers to trade.
It is then urgent to ask WWF for whom the organisation works: the business elite? On which grounds can the conservation organisation claim to defend the environment when it is in partnership with the biggest polluters in the world? Can a Not-for-Profit organisation run a budget surplus of more than US$100 million (accounts are protected by the banking secret as the WWF headquarter is in Switzerland) and still call itself a Non-Profit organisation? Can, we, the defenders of social justice let an organisation linked with so many corporate and elite interests control and operate in such a vast areas of lands in the Third World, as a defender of neo-colonialists and eugenicists projects?
See: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/042806-GT-PW-rigoberta...