What is 'World Growth' and Why Does It Hate Forests So Much?

by Emily Gertz

Published December 05, 2008 @ 09:33AM PT

When The New York Times devotes a few hundred words to a new report -- in print, or on one of its blogs -- instantly that report and whoever produced it gains sheen of credibility.

So it goes with yesterday's post by James Kanter on Green Inc., the energy-environment-business blog of The New York Times. Kanter recapitulates the arguments of a group named "World Growth" that "describes itself as a non-profit organization that favors globalization and free trade to help disadvantaged populations."

According to Mr. Kanter, World Growth opposes efforts to preserve the globe's forests as part of an overall strategy to curb global warming; disputes scientific findings that a full fifth of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are being caused by deforestation; and argues that even when forests are turned into wood products like paper, and from there make their way to landfills, the carbon stored in that wood/paper/wooden toilet seat is kept out of the atmosphere.

Finally, World Growth calls compensating developing nations for keeping land forested instead of razing forests for agriculture -- in essence, creating a profitable global carbon farming industry -- "green global welfare" that will keep food from the mouths of of the poor and hungry.

Mr. Kanter quotes World Growth's new report:

If the leading mitigation strategy for forestry is deforestation and, as is proposed in the R.E.D.D. [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation] strategy, developing countries are paid to cease deforestation, they will be paid to cease conversion of land to produce food and sustain society. This is an anti-development strategy. And where this activity reduced commercial forestry in plantations and natural forest, this would remove an activity which created jobs, generated taxes and earned export income. Productive economic activity is halted and in return money is paid. This is a form of Green global welfare.

Hot-button words, right! Will developing nations become international welfare cheats, reaping in big bucks from the industrial G20 nations that need to compensate for their prodigious greenhouse pollution? While at the same time starving out their own underpriviledged citizens?

Before going further, it's important to note that the world's nations grow enough food to feed even today's population of over six billion. Global hunger has long been identified as a problem with distribution, not with production. And it's economic and social inequity that leave so many with so little while others don't have to worry -- that is, the problems of distribution are political, not technological or a result of "nature's whims."

It's also important to realize that when forests are razed in nations that have a stake in an international R.E.D.D. strategy, like Malaysia or Indonesia, it is largely to create monocultural plantations of crops destined for export in some form -- such as oil palms that end up providing palm oil as a feedstock for biofuel, for cooking oil, or as an ingredient in many processed foods -- and not to grow food crops that will stay in-country to feed the citizenry.

See The Institute for Food and Development Policy's backgrounder on 12 Myths About Hunger for a more thorough debunking of these mis-beliefs that World Growth seems to be promoting.

Back at Green Inc., Mr. Kanter rightly notes that even proponents of curbing climate destabilization by preserving forests have reservations about the R.E.D.D. strategy:

Scientists and environmentalists want mechanisms to reward the developing world for saving its forests incorporated into any such treaty.

Even champions of the idea, however...acknowledge that it will be hard to monitor whether people or companies are cutting down forests and jungles they have promised to preserve, or whether deforestation simply is shifting to unregulated areas. They also acknowledge that it will be hard to guarantee that promises made by one government to preserve forests will be respected by future landowners, governments or regimes.

So, as with just about every plan being discussed to curb global warming, there are inherent intricacies to be untangled and problems to be solved in strategies to preserve the world's forests. No news there.

The real question is: what is World Growth's stake in this horserace?

Mr. Kanter has done colleagues like myself a favor by offering up this group and its ideas to scrutiny. So I decided to take a look. What I've found so far suggests that World Growth has a lot riding on seeing those forests come down. More after the jump...

World Growth's website is unilluminating. Under the title "History of World Growth," there is nothing like a linear narrative of dates and milestones, such as information on when the group was founded, who works there, and how it's funded.

What we do find here are some warm words about how "the gradual replacement of trade wars with trade agreements is creating levels of economic growth, social understanding and cultural richness unprecedented in history." One imagines that the thousands earning a meagre living picking coltan out of junked electronics dumped in China, living in refugee camps in Congo, or still unable to return to flood-destroyed homes New Orleans, would not agree that much progress has been made in "social understanding and cultural richness."

Maybe World Growth is out to improve the lives of these and others, the millions of people existing on the economic fringes of the unarguable advances in overall global prosperity.

Or maybe it's not. At the very bottom of this "history," we get to the actual nut of what this group is about:

The high media profile of the anti-globalization movement has created a disturbing imbalance of information about international organizations and multinational businesses. World Growth seeks to restore balance to the debate by documenting how globalization promotes health, wealth and freedom.

In other words, World Growth exists to promote a set of ideas in the world's newspapers, magazine, broadcast media and blogs, which are supposedly biased towards critics of transnational corporate business and economic globalization.

For all that World Growth's web site copy decries the attention paid to what it terms a "dramatic increase in protests against globalization, including violent demonstrations in places such as Seattle (1999), Cancun (2003) and Gleneagles, Scotland (2005)... protests [that] have often been accompanied by attacks on corporations that do business on a global scale," I would call these efforts intermittent, and coverage of them more akin to nature documentary than newsgathering: Let's watch the wild activist in its native habitat -- the city street -- as it engages in amusing behaviors like protesting, chanting, and marching with signboards.

Off the top of my head, the press unequivocally devoted to critiquing globalization seems quite limited: Mother Jones and The Nation at the national level, and loosely coordinated efforts like IndyMedia at the edge. With traditional magazines and newspapers presenting different pro and con arguments depending on the story and the reporter.

Compare this to the enormous daily footprint of the world's business news media. In the U.S. alone, we have CNBC, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Bloomberg, Forbes, public radio's MarketPlace, and more, all reporting on the world economy as it is -- globalized -- and not as anyone might want it to be.

Well, fair enough. Everyone's entitled to promote their point of view, although I strongly suspect that critics of globalization have a much harder time getting a coherent hearing in the press than proponents. So what is World Growth's stake in this debate?

While a link to "Board of Advisors" yields a blank page, chairman Alan Oxley is very visible on the site. He's described as "a [former] career diplomat with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade with postings at the United Nations in New York and Geneva. He served as Australia’s Ambassador to the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade -- the forerunner of today's World Trade Organization] and Chairman of the GATT Contracting Parties, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization."

A little Google-scratching beneath the surface reveals that Mr. Oxley has relatively little direct experience bettering the lives of the poor or hungry, but does bring a pro-business bias to his job. SourceWatch reports that:

Alan Oxley is an Australian academic, a lobbyist for free trade agreements, a climate change skeptic and trenchant critic of the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions.

Oxley is the founder and director of Melbourne-based company ITS Global and is chairman of the Australian APEC Study Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is also the director of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement Business Group, a corporate lobby group which he established to lobby in favour of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. He also consults to the Australian forest sector and Malaysian logging giant Rimbunan Hijau [1].

Oxley is a regular participant in Lavoisier Group events, and is the host of the Asia-Pacific pages of Tech Central Station - a conservative website funded by ExxonMobil and General Motors Corporation among others.

And why should we trust SourceWatch? It is a project of The Center for Media and Democracy, which has the transparently expressed goal of stregthening participatory democracy "by investigating and exposing public relations spin and propaganda, and by promoting media literacty and citizen journalism." Neither SourceWatch nor the CMD has a stake in whether forests remain standing to absorb carbon dioxide from our overheated atmosphere, or are cut down in favor of producing palm oil for export.

If I set out to report on World Growth in more depth (hello, assigning editors!), I'd certainly drill further down from what SourceWatch provides, and look for primary sources that document Mr. Oxley's activities and associations.

But in just a couple hours of basic research, I dug up credible information that Mr. Oxley, -- and by extension World Growth -- appears to have a lot at stake in whether forests are razed or preserved. He appears to have significant connections to private interests that have long and skillfully manipulated the public, and the media, to delay action on global warming. He's also got connections to business interests that would gain hugely from logging out forests and trading on the global market, rather than preserving them as carbon farms and sources of sustainable income for the nations that preserve them, and their citizens.

Hopefully this will be reported as well on the pages of The New York Times -- be they digital or dead-tree.

Update, Dec. 7: Upon doing a bit more digging, I found that World Growth is also a professional distributor of global warming denial.

Image: Deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia, 1992-2001. Source: Nasa Earth Observatory.

"Indonesia is rapidly losing its lowland forests to logging, much of it illegal. At present, logging is claiming the forests at a rate of nearly two million hectares (slightly less than 5 million acres: roughly the same area as the state of Massachusetts) each year. At this rate, the island of Sumatra will have no more lowland forests by 2005, a fate already befallen the island of Sulawesi. Indonesia’s lowland forests are home to a wide variety of wildlife and are considered among the richest ecosystems in the world. Among the unique life forms in these forests are the Orangutan and the Sumatra Tiger. Sixteen percent of the entire world’s bird species, eleven percent of its plants, and ten percent of all mammals on Earth call these forests home. Many are found nowhere else."