News In Brief...

Occidental gives up on U’wa land
Occidental Petroleum announced at its annual meeting in May that it is withdrawing from oil exploration in the traditional territory of the U’wa people in Colombia, following a ten-year peaceful campaign by the U’wa, supported by activists around the world.
Last July, Oxy announced that its first exploratory well on U’wa land had turned up dry. Today the company cited economic reasons for relinquishing the Siriri block, while observers noted that the company’s continuing public relations conflicts around U’wa issue weighed heavily on the decision. Peaceful U’wa resistance to the Oxy project has been met with violent repression over the years, in one case resulting in the death of three indigenous children during a military break up of peaceful U’wa blockades.
Meanwhile, Occidental also finds itself centre stage in the growing controversy around the Bush Administration’s military aid proposal to hand over $98 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to defend Occidental’s Caño Limon oil pipeline in Colombia, which runs through traditional U’wa land, setting a dangerous precedent of US taxpayers covering private corporations’ security expenses overseas.
Source - Rainforest Action Network

Road rot continues
Road building companies will be celebrating the decision to spend £ 263m on widening 29 miles of the A1 north of Leeds to a 3-lane motorway. To date, pledges for road building on the A1 route in Yorkshire exceed £520m with further proposals of £137m for dualling the A1 north of Newcastle.
The Governments decision this June is another example of Labour’s drip-drip road building programme. Expect many other similar announcements around the country, for details see Transport 2000’s newsletter ‘Roads Round-up’. Email andreww@transport2000.org.uk for a copy

MuckDollars news
In April, McDonalds released its first Report on Corporate Social Responsibility, which immediately attracted a blistering attack from US sustainability campaigner Paul Hawken. He describes the report as ‘…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. That their report is based on the Global Reporting Initiative [GRI - see pp 4-5] calls to question whether the GRI have anything to do with the concept of sustainability or true corporate responsibility…[the report] presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food that is produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability. As the founder of The Natural Step (TNS) in the United States, I can say that nothing could be further from the idea of sustainability than the McDonald’s Corporation.’
Meanwhile, the burgermonster has agreed to pay out $10m and issued a formal apology for fraudulently describing its ‘fries’ as vegetarian when the so-called ‘vegetable oil’ they were cooked in actually contained ‘essence of beef’. Lawsuits had been brought by vegetarians and Hindu groups in the US. www.mcspotlight.org

BNFL’s nuclear waste storage ‘unsatisfactory’, says report
A report by the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) and the Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (NuSAC) has criticised the UK’s handling of intermediate-level nuclear waste (ILW - waste which is not radioactive enough to generate its own heat, but requires radiation containment or shielding). The report revealed that most of this waste is currently stored in a largely untreated form; as of April 1998 only around 12% of ILW had been ‘conditioned’ - put into a form suitable for long-term safe storage or disposal. Some of the untreated waste is described as ‘poorly characterised’ and ‘degraded and held in old facilities subject to deterioration.’ - as Peter Roche of Greenpeace put it in the Observer, ‘unknown waste, which could easily leak, stored in buildings which are falling down.’

The situation appears to have come about due to confusion over government policy and cost-minimisation by British Nuclear Fuels and Nirex, the company repsonsible for disposing of the waste. The bill for dealing with the existing stock of nuclear waste is estimated at £1.8bn a year for the next twenty years - and that doesn’t include new waste from the continuing nuclear program.
The report recommends waste be transferred to ‘interim storage’ suitable for 100-150 years - hopefully by then they’ll have worked out a way to get rid of it safely.
Source: Observer 30/6/02,
DEFRA website www.defra.gov.uk/rwmac/reports/interwaste/index.htm

Budgens taken over
Irish retail giant Musgrave is buying UK food retailer Budgens for £232m. Budgens' 225 shops will add to Musgrave’s 550+ franchised outlets (including SupaValu and Centra) in the Republic of Ireland and interests in Northern Ireland and Spain.

Book of the Month
Eveline Lubber’s new edited volume ‘Battling Big Business’ should be read by everyone involved in anti-corporate activism. The first half of the book, with articles on greenwash, infiltration, cyber-surveillance and libel, gives you a useful, if slightly paranoia inducing, introduction to the lengths that corporations will go to sabotage successful anti-corporate activism (just who is that new volunteer in the office?, do you trust your paper recyclers?). The second half of the book is full of useful ideas on how to beat corporate bullying. It seems if you aren’t being sued, monitored or infiltrated by corporations then you aren’t a threat - whether you would actually know about it is another thing. Green Books, ISBN 1-903998-14-X