Achieving the MDGs Means Companies Must Do No Harm
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Campaigners have expressed their disappointment with the Government’s “Business Call to Action” on the Millennium Development Goals, announced today, warning it could distract from the main challenge of ensuring companies behave responsibly in poor countries.
Members of the Corporate Responsibility (CORE) Coalition (1) said that if poor people are really to derive benefits from business investments, governments should first and foremost ensure that companies core operations do no harm through abuse of human rights, poor working conditions and environmental degradation.
The initiative, which involves companies like Anglo American, Wal-Mart, PepsiCo and DeBeers in international efforts to alleviate poverty, focuses only upon using corporate skills to tackle global poverty and halve the proportion of the world’s poor and hungry people by 2015.