When it comes to pushing tar sands oil, the folks over at EthicalOil.org have gone completely bananas.
This week, the website dedicated to convincing the planet that tar sands crude is more “ethical” than the stuff the rest of the world is importing from Middle East “dictatorships” – have you seen how they treat their women? – are urging Canadians in national radio ads to boycott Chiquita. That would be the banana company.
Ethical Oil says it’s launching its campaign to rebut “inaccurate and unfair” criticisms of the oil sands. Namely, the banana company’s own “boycott” of tar sands crude. Predictably, a number of Conservative MPs, Jason Kenney among them, have joined in the boycott Chiquita fun.
Chiquita isn’t actually “boycotting” tar sands fuel. In a letter to environment group Forest Ethics, the company says it will make best efforts to “avoid, where possible,” filling up its trucks with fuel from tar sands refineries. Easier said than done given the vagaries of the oil and gas market. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good wedge issue.
Chiquita’s letter was enough to stir Ethical Oil into campaign mode. Up went the Facebook page and Twitter accounts with handles like @BloodBananas to give the right wingnuts out there on the Web something to be morally outraged about this holiday season.
No doubt there’ll be a few references to “bananas” and “republics” in online commentary on the subject, if there haven’t been already. I don’t know for sure since I make it a point of avoiding (notice I didn’t use the word boycott?) the crap low brows on the right engage in online. But back to the topic at hand.
Chiquita is a soft target. In March 2007, the company pled guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of “engaging in transactions with a specially-designated global terrorist.” The company confessed to paying $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the right-wing military group responsible for countless human rights abuses in that country, not to mention the killings of trade unionists. Ethical Oil was quick to take up the human rights abuses angle in its radio ads.
But let’s pull back the peel on this controversy a little more before we get too high and mighty.
Lest we forget that our own oil sands-pushing Conservative government signed a free trade deal with Colombia last year, despite the concerns raised by human rights groups, trade unionists and indigenous groups about being targeted by right-wing paramilitaries with links to the Colombian government. More trade unionists are killed in Colombia than any country on earth.
The PM didn’t seem too preoccupied about that when he signed on the dotted line, just so Canuck mining interests could have access to Colombia’s silver and gold, not to mention, build giant dams that will have the effect of pushing peasants off their land.
In fact, the HarperCons were willful in their ignorance about government-sponsored abuses in Colombia, tried to cover up the fact the Colombian government, despite efforts in recent years to clean-up widespread corruption, still have blood on their hands. Parliament’s Standing Committee on International Trade urged the PM to exercise caution. It asked for an impartial third-party human rights assessment before any trade agreement was struck with Colombia. But that never happened.
Perhaps those inconvenient truths informed the PM’s careful remarks on the subject of Ethical Oil’s boycott of Chiquita when he was asked about it while in Toronto Friday. Harp refrained from beating his chest in self-righteous indignation, saying something about working toward making tar sands oil more acceptable, blah, blah, blah.
But the PM can’t run too far from his connection to Ethical Oil’s campaign. The site is funded by his buddies in Big Oil.
It also just so happens that the PM’s director of planning, one Alykhan Velshi, founded EthicalOil.org before he took up residence in the PMO last month.
Velshi started the site as a blogger to promote the ideas of Ezra Levant’s book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, and “expose the network of anti-oil sands lobbyists who meet regularly with senior Environment Canada officials.” Oh, scary.
It’s worth noting, too, Velshi’s other political stops, including a gig in the office of MP John Baird when he was Environment Minister.
On the Chiquita boycott business, making Ethical Oil’s argument slipperier is the seeming absence of any understanding of the company’s history in Latin America, and its role in U.S. colonialism. If Chiquita deserves to be boycotted, it’s for those historical sins.
Like other banana giants operating in the southern hemisphere, they were built by U.S. and other Western powers, who were granted control of large tracts of farmland to develop the banana trade for huge profits – a little like the appropriation taking place all over the developing world to make way for the bulldozers of Canuck mining giants.
Chiquita’s operations in Colombia predate the 1960s, when it was known as the United Fruit Company and involved in the massive expulsion of peasants for its plantations.
The U.S.’s involvement in Guatemala and the CIA’s overthrow of that government in 1954 came shortly after 400,000 acres of unused land had been confiscated by the government from United Fruit for redistribution among peasants. (The former secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration at the time, one John Foster Dulles, was a former lawyer for United Fruit.)
Giant multinationals continue to monopolize the banana market today. In 2008, the European Union fined companies $60 Euros for price fixing. Chiquita was among the companies but managed to dodge fines.
Perhaps Chiquita’s co-called “boycott” of tar sands oil is PR. Or maybe, as at least one Western Canadian commentator has pointed out, the company is trying to clean up its act. Tar sands pushers like Ethical Oil can learn a lesson from that.
The truth about tar sands development is that, what it’s doing to native people and the environment is not unlike Chiquita’s legacy in Latin America. Or am I comparing apples to oranges?
