Greenwashing Award 2010′ goes to a Brazilian company Yaguarete Por? S.A., for bulldozing an uncontacted tribe’s land for beef in Paraguay. The winner of this ‘competition’ has been named by Survival – an international organization supporting tribal peoples worldwide since 1969.
The term greenwashing refers to the practices of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, such as by presenting cost cuts as reductions in use of resources. In other words, greenwashing happens when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be environmentally friendly through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact.
Survival director, Stephen Corry calls this example from Paraguay, ‘a textbook ‘greenwashing’: bulldoze the forest and then ‘preserve’ a bit of it for PR purposes. The Brazilian company has won the award for ‘dressing up’ the wholesale destruction of a huge area of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode tribe’s forest as a “noble gesture for conservation”.
Yaguarete owns 78,549 hectares of forest that is part of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode tribe’s ancestral territory. After satellite photos were published around the world revealing that it has destroyed thousands of hectares of the tribe’s forest, the company issued a press release announcing it intends to create a ‘nature reserve’ on its land. According to Survival, the company in fact plans to convert around two thirds of the land to cattle ranching and beef production.
The Totobiegosode tribe has been claiming legal title to this land since 1993, but most of it is still in private hands. This violates their rights under both Paraguayan and international law. Till today 57,000 people around the world who have signed a petition in support of the Totobiegosode tribe.
Screen name Antonis, writing on Ecoclub.com about the ‘Greenwashing Award 2010’, has a cynical, but somewhat realistic view of greenwashing:
The pr people could have done even better, by also promising that the beef will be “organic”… Meanwhile they could cut and sell the timber, and then secure carbon offsetting funds to replant and preserve a small area where they could build a boutique “ecoresort” to “give work” to the now landless indigenous….the whole novel project under the patronage and guidance of powerful big NGOs could secure funding and multi-awards…
Text: Emily H?ckert
Picture: Survival