Blue washing
- April 28, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Blue washing
Subject :Environment
Section: Climate change
Context: Report flags how corporates have wormed their way into global food governance
More on the News:
- A new research has highlighted how corporate capture of global food governance is increasingly taking place in more visible ways. There has been a growing presence of firms in governance and spaces, staking claims to be legitimate actors, for example, through public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder roundtables.
- When corporations are involved in public governance, they can also justify involvement by reframing the concept of public interest in terms that benefit corporations and large private businesses rather than people and the environment, noted Who’s tipping the scales report, released by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES).
- The Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and food inflation, aggravated the issue of corporate involvement. Following these crises, governments and multilateral agencies have been facing fund crunches.
- They control the system “through lobbying behind the scenes, political and institutional donations, market power, shaping trade and investment rules, shaping research and innovation, as well as influencing other structural aspects of global food systems.”
- The FAO’s partnership with CropLife, a major pesticide lobby organisation that has many large agribusiness firms as members, is one of the more recent examples of this type of arrangement, the document pointed out.
- “While such partnerships allow firms to ‘blue-wash’ or ‘social-wash’ their reputations via closer links with the UN and other intergovernmental bodies, critics have charged that these kinds of partnerships between private sector actors and international governance bodies also create conflicts of interest,” the IPES report said.
Bluewashing
- Bluewashing is term used to describe deceptive marketing that overstates a company’s commitment to responsible social practices.
- It can be used interchangeably with the term greenwashing but has a greater focus on economic and community factors. Alternatively, it could be phrased as a way that companies hide the social damage that their policies have caused.
- Active disinformation is a tool that companies use to make their goods or services more attractive to their consumers and shareholders.