McDonald’s Report: More Corporate Social Irresponsibility

By Paul Hawken (*)

SAUSALITO/USA - (IPS) - Facing a barrage of criticism about its effects on nutrition, society, and the environment, McDonald's recently came out with its Report on Corporate Social Responsibility in a bid to absolve itself of these charges and try to make good as a corporate citizen.

But the report falls far short. A low-water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of corporate social responsibility, the paper 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.

This is not a report about stakeholder rights, as the company 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. Then it accuses these critics of not wanting to make things better while ignoring what they are most concerned about.

Like Ronald McDonald, the McDonald's Social Responsibility Report is pure fantasy. It presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of restaurants that serve fried, sugary junk food produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardisation, and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability.

Nothing could be further from sustainability than the McDonald's Corporation.

The Report states that ''being a socially responsible leader [its self-characterisation] 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, yet it has done little to modify its menu.

In the arena of social equity, McDonald's has resisted from its inception all attempts to organise its workers, and through industry trade organisations has consistently and intensely lobbied

against increases in the minimum wage. To say McDonald's has actively worked to crush trade unions is an understatement.

While it is good to see corporate actors promote ideas about a more enlightened use of materials and reducing waste, it is important to note when corporations use such strategies to avoid

deeper structural issues regarding sustainability.

This is certainly the case with McDonald's. For years it has promoted and demanded the least expensive standardised food for its chains. In so doing it has created powerful incentives for the

centralisation 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 of 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 raising practices that required antibiotics to avoid massive die-off of their flocks.

Simply stated, standardised food destroys agricultural and biological diversity. Nothing could be more antithetical to the recovery of over-stressed 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.

Transnational corporations such as McDonald's and their associated lobbyists and trade associations have led efforts to Americanise trade through representatives at the WTO. They have prevented the strengthening of environmental and labour laws and 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.

A valid report on sustainability and social responsibility must ask the question: What if everybody did it?

The report carefully avoids the corporation's real environmental effects. It talks about water use at the outlets, but fails to note that every quarter-pounder requires 600 gallons of water. It talks about recycled paper, but not the pfisteria-laden waters caused by large-scale pork producers in the southeast US. It talks about energy use in the restaurants but not in the unsustainable

food system McDonald's relies upon, which uses 10 calories of energy for every calorie of good produced.

''Sustaining'' McDonald's requires a simple unsustainable formula: cheap food plus cheap non-unionised labour plus deceptive advertising equals 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 societal and environmental costs not counted in corporate

annual reports and accounting documents -- externalities-- borne by other people, places, and generations: the draining of aquifers, contaminated waterways, 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-dollar

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 candour, transparency and corporate honesty.

Unless the core values of the company are to nourish and protect children, its cannot make the supply chain sustainable because the final outcome is destructive to life. It is a dilemma poet Henry David Thoreau identified over a hundred years ago: ''Improved means to an unimproved end.''

(*) Paul Hawken, author of ''The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism'', 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.