Apologies that the attachment to my last message was unintelligible. The 
draft of the statement in favour of the motion should read as below. Again I 
would stress that I am no expert on this issue and therefore would welcome 
any comments, additions or amendments - to reach me by this Thursday (17 
Oct) at the latest.

Thanks,

Mike Woods
Institute of Earth Studies, Univesity of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB
Tel: 01970 622589
Fax: 01970 622659
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

"We call upon the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British 
Geographers) to end the Shell Oil Company's position as corporate patron 
immediately."

Statement in support of the motion.

The horrific events in Nigeria over the past year will have been followed by 
many Fellows. On November 10th 1995, the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight 
other environmental campaigners from the Ogoniland area of the Niger Delta 
were executed by the Nigerian government. The executions and preceeding 
judicial process were widely condemned; John Major spoke of 'judicial 
murder' resulting from a 'fraudulent trial'.

The executions resulted directly from a campaign against the environmental 
despoliation of Ogoniland by Shell. The Movement for the Survival of the 
Ogoni People claims that Shell's activities have devasted the environment 
through the indiscriminate flaring of gas, the building of high-pressure 
pipelines across agricultural land and water pollution from oil leaks and 
spillages. Shell is further accused of complicity with the Nigerian junta's 
repression of protest and of denying Ogoni people a share in the wealth 
generated by the oil industry.

Shell's response has stressed the complexity of the situation in Nigeria. 
The background to the issue is well document and was debated at the 
Society's 'Open Forum' in April. However, many of our objections to Shell's 
patronage do not depend on the outcome of arguments about the causes of 
individual oil spillages, nor are they diminished by divisions among the 
Ogoni about the best way to fight for environmental and political rights. We 
believe that the following are central to the patronage issue:

Shell is directly responsible for extensive environmental damage in Nigeria.
Shell's own publicity acknowledges major problems with corroding pipelines 
and other ageing and unsafe facilities in Nigeria, and little work has been 
done to improve facilities since Shell withdrew its staff in 1993. Shell's 
activities also have wider consequences, a Word Wide Fund for Nature report 
suggesting that flaring gas in Nigeria makes a huge contribution to world 
emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.

Shell is guilty of double standards in its treatment of rich and poor countries.
Ken Saro-Wiwa made this point strongly in his final interview before his 
execution: "In Britain, Shell produces oil, but you look at the adverts - 
they are talking of keeping the valleys neat and clean so that human beings 
will not know that anything is going on there. In Ogoni, Shell pipelines are 
there for all to see.... I accuse Shell of racism because they are doing in 
Ogoni what they dare not do in Europe or America, where they also prospect 
for oil."

Shell retains close ties with the murderous Nigerian government.
Shell has argued that it does not intervene in politics; yet, its support 
for the repression of Ogoni protests is a political act. In 1990 at 
Umuechem, Shell called for the Nigerian Mobile Police Force to provide 
'protection' during a peaceful demonstration. Eighty people were shot and 
495 homes destroyed. The Mobile Police Force is routinely equipped by large 
companies and Shell acknowledges that it has purchased weapons for the 
police. Furthermore, by continuing in partnership with the Nigerian National 
Petroleum Corporation, Shell helps to secure the financial income of the 
regime, 80% of whose revenues come from the oil industry.

We believe that it is unethical for the RGS-IBG to gain from the profits of 
the exploitation, repression and suffering associated with Shell's 
activities in Nigeria. As a learned society, we have a duty to provide 
intellectual leadership to society at large. In particular, the RGS-IBG is 
looked to as an arbiter of environmental good practice. Our sponsors know 
this, as the review of Corporate Patronage acknowleged, corporate support 
risks "giving legitimacy to a sponsor's values, which might not be consonant 
with the Society's aims" and "giving credibility in the public eye to a 
sponsor's activities when directly related to the Society's areas of 
expertise." If we were to allow Shell to continue as a sponsor, we would be 
conveying the impression that the kind of environmental despoliation 
experienced in Ogoni is acceptable corporate behaviour.

Finally, the Society should always put its Fellows' interests first. 
Whatever the truth of the accusations made against Shell, the company's 
reputation has been so severely damaged both in the Third World and among 
environmental groups globally, that Shell's continued association with the 
RGS-IBG seriously threatens the academic credibility of Fellows working in 
the fields of environment studies, development studies and economic 
geography. In particular, any academic work on the Ogoni issue or its wider 
context is compromised by links to the RGS-IBG, whether those links be in 
the form of membership, financial assistance, publication in the Society's 
journals, or mere disciplinary association with an organization claiming to 
represent British Geography.

We do not believe that ending Shell's sponsorship will damage the Society 
financially in the long term. We believe that the Review of Corporate 
Sponsorship has established a strong framework which will allow the Society 
to continue to benefit from corporate sponsorship in the future without 
compromising its ethical position. This is not a comfortable issue for the 
Society to resolve, but it is vital that we make the right decision now if 
the RGS-IBG is to maintain its position at the forefront of world Geography 
and is to keep the respect of academics, the media, interest groups, 
governmental agencies and the general pubilic, across the globe, into the 
twenty-first century.

We hope that you will support the motion.



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