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Action at Green Week this morning
Milieu, Klimaat, CJA BELGIUM -

Action at Green Week this morning

donderdag 3 juni 2010 09:42
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EU Green Week disturbed by action group

Today, activists present at the European Commission’s Green Week in the
Charlemagne building in Brussels, intervened in a part of the 2-day
policy summit titled ‘Pricing the earth: How business can protect and
profit from biodiversity’ organised by ‘Friends of Europe’, a
corporate-sponsored think tank.

The activists, blowing whistles and shouting ‘Stop Greenwashing!’,
spread out two red banners reading: ‘BP, Coca Cola and other criminals
sponsor this event’ and ‘Green Week is as green as this banner’.

In this way, they are pointing out the fact that in the Green Week, some
of the most dirty business (chemicals, oil, agrofuels, nuclear power),
behind the smokescreen of a ‘think tank’, is given a high profile
platform to influence the EU ‘environmental debate’. “So far, business
has done nothing to protect, but everything to exploit biodiversity”,
said one member of the action group. “In this session, Coca Cola is
invited to speak on how consumers can be persuaded to bear the costs for
conserving biodiversity, while this company is making profits from
destroying it”.

Among the list of sponsors of the said ‘non-profit think tank’, one
finds companies with an appauling record of environmental crimes, in the
EU and worldwide; companies such as BP, which for over a month now has
left the Gulf of Mexico and its biodiversity prey to the appetite of
1,000 barrels of oil per day; companies such as Coca Cola, which has
been found guilty of sucking and polluting scarce water resources in the
developing world, in order to ‘let our happiness grow’; companies such
as UNICA, that promote the use of agrofuels to fuel European cars, while
in Brazil land is taken from small farming systems and biodiverse
ecosystems for sugar cane monocultures.

One member of the action group declared that this cosy marriage between
the EU and corporate lobby groups should be broken. She added that, if
we really want to protect biodiversity, we should start by ‘changing the
capitalist system, and putting an end to its looting of natural
resources and human lives in the name of exponential growth’

Bron :

Pictures can be obtained from :http://www.demarche.org/greenwashingweek
Press contact : 0488/264,368

Luc Schrijvers is a member of C.J.A  Belgium

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