Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-16-Speech-4-036"
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"en.20020516.1.4-036"2
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"Madam President, I want to take a little time to talk about corporate social responsibility and sustainable development, not from the Left but from the Right of this chamber. Unless the corporate social responsibility issues are understood properly, this will become another sort of shibboleth for the global economy.
Global economy requires global rules. If you do not have global rules to sustain the development of our planet, we are going to end up with a problem where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the environment will get worse and sustainable development flies out of the window. Sixty thousand people will be wasting their time in Johannesburg in September.
The last time there was a semblance of any sort of global economy was during the period of the empires, when the British, the French, the Italians and the Spanish empires went out and created economic activity. But even the British East India company had social corporative responsibility: they built schools; they cleaned up Bengal; they built railways; they put infrastructure in and they created offset investments. That is how the inter-dependency between economies of the poorer and the richer countries developed.
Today, corporate social responsibility requires us to recognise that if you take the top 200 largest multinational companies, their combined turnover is greater than the combined GNP of 172 countries. So the 200 chairmen of these companies have enormous social responsibility. We need to enjoin them to forge a partnership for development; not carp about what they do, but help them, because shareholder value depends hugely now, even in the City of London, on whether companies behave ethically. I have seen time and time again that companies with proper environmental and development policies have higher shareholder value than those companies that engage in looting and raping the other places.
So I am asking colleagues on my Right, not colleagues on my Left who are already there, to understand that inter-dependence requires us to look at our own economic and enterprise development and tell our companies to be partners in this development process."@en1
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