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Companies that make strong claims about their ‘greenness’ have been
savaged by Greenpeace. In its report Greenwash, written for the summit,
Greenpeace says that Shell accounts for approximately 3 per cent of the
human contribution to emissions of carbon dioxide and plays an ‘aggressive
role’ in the drive to develop the world’s one trillion barrels of known
oil reserves.

The report by the International Chamber of Commerce, From Ideas into
Action, paints a different picture. It quotes a senior manager in Shell
as saying ‘our future must be one in which Shell companies excel in environmental
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Also in the ICC report, Yoshinobu Nagano of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce
says Mitsubishi ‘realises that the conservation of forest resources is of
utmost importance’. The Japanese multinational company is experimenting
with a reforestation project in Sarawak. But, says Greenpeace, ‘Mitsubishi
is a leading destroyer of tropical rainforest. The Malaysian operation in
Sarawak is the most notorious.’

At the summit’s industry forum, Erling Lorentzen, chairman of the Brazilian
wood pulp producer Aracruz Cellulose, talked about how the company had
planted eucalyptus trees on land that had been previously deforested by
‘loggers, charcoal makers, livestock raisers and farmers’.

According to Greenpeace, however, ‘the company’s plantations included
around 15 000 hectares of Tupiniquim Indian lands to which the company gained
the rights simply by claiming that the people living in the area were not
Indians any more’.