Dear all,

Regarding the Feed the World website, i encountered it about four
months ago. I personally went through a mini version of this debate
before finally deciding to 'push the button' and thus indicate my
support for the concept, even if i have reservations.

I want to second Liisa Cormode's assertion. There is a lot more to
this particular issue than can be encompassed in a quick negative
response.

There is a very interesting literature on cooperation between
environmental NGOs (Greenpeace, WWF, etc) and large corporations -- and
the case studies show that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
And sometimes the NGO gets co-opted, as was the experience with the
Greenpeace/MacDonalds programme in the US. David Murphy at the New
Academy of Business has a book out on this topic.

Closely related to his work is work in the Social Policy field by Sue
Barratt on corporate philanthropy, which, among other things, examines
business's attempts to 'rationalise' or quantify benefit in corporate
good citizenship programmes. As i recall, the verdict is that this
can't be done and some of the most successful programmes happened to
have corporate sponsors who reject financial benefit as a reason for
corporate good citizenship but who nevertheless feel an almost moral
obligation to 'give something back' to communities, or to help 'build
healthy communities'. ---Yes, these literatures talk in these terms.

So that brings up the question of how can large capitalist
profit-making enterprises talk of 'morals' or even 'community'? After
all, by the foundational constitution of their identities as capitalist
corporations, morals are subsumed by profit. They are fundamentally
unable to operate in other than strict profit-taking mode, otherwise
they will fail against other more rapacious competitors.
And yet some of them do. {Bye the way, there is a far larger
percentage of businesses with corporate philosophy programmes, and
individual firms give much more, in American than in Britain --
interesting to think on this....}

In the same way, how can we, employed by Universities, driving cars,
willingly borrowing capital to buy houses from big banks; how can we
talk of morals? Are we not as immured in the system as the
corporations, even those of us who actively oppose the system? None of
us get out of here clean, in those terms.

Yet of course, we can and do think in terms other than rationalities of
profit. We exist in a complex, contradictory, several universe and
our responses are also complex, contradictory and several. And so, in
the end, i personally decided that a bowl of rice is a bowl of rice and
that although i found the process distasteful, i would overcome my
aesthetic objections and push the button.




Other interesting questions arise when you look at the list of
corporate sponsors. I didn't recognise any of them. By this, i take
it that they are not large multi-national corp'ns. What does this
represent, then? Interestingly, the sponsorship page does try and
define the benefit to a sponsor, check out their formula....

i wondered when this debate would appear on the forum. At the risk of
over egging the cake, 'It's Good To Talk'.

cheers

rhys


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Rhys Evans
Arkelton Centre For Rural Development Research
University of Aberdeen
Old Aberdeen, UK AB24 3DS





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