Love truth: open up the books on mineral extraction
CAFOD Campaigners joined Tearfund and ONE on 13 February to send an early Valentine’s Day message to newly appointed minister Norman Lamb.
Carrying a giant love heart with the message “love truth” to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the groups, part of the Publish What You Pay Coalition, were raising awareness of a new law that would force oil, gas and mining companies to tell the truth about payments they make to governments of poor countries in return for their natural resources.
Local communities are losing out
From Cambodia and Peru to the Democratic Republic of Congo, when minerals are exploited for profit, all too often local communities do not benefit from the wealth beneath their feet. One third of the world's poorest people live in resource-rich countries.
Secrecy about payments and contracts increases the risk of bad deals and corruption. But when people know what revenues their governments are receiving from natural resources, they have the chance to demand a fair deal. If spent well, profits from natural resource revenues could help hundreds of millions of people living in poverty.
Thanks to your campaigning, our government is now supporting new EU legislation to make sure multinational companies publish what they pay on the tax and revenue payments they make to governments worldwide.This is finally being debated on 20 February.
CAFOD has been calling for greater transparency in the gas, oil and mining industries since 2002 when we helped found Publish What You Pay.
Lack of transparency enables multinational companies to avoid and evade the taxes that are due to developing country governments. Global Financial Integrity estimates that the money to lost to these countries as a result is over US$1 trillion each year - more than the foreign aid and investment they receive.
In 2002, the UK government launched the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative - showing it was possible for companies to declare information about payments. However the scheme was only voluntary, so progress was slow and many resource-rich countries simply opted out.
At the Teatime for Change mass lobby of parliament in 2010, thousands of you made the case to your MPs for binding legislation that applies to all companies and countries. The proposed EU legislation follows in the footsteps of ground-breaking US legislation passed in 2010 requiring reporting of company payments on a country and a project basis.
After years of calling for change, we’re now so close. But industry lobbyists are fighting hard to water down the proposals to continue to keep people in the dark about the payments and profits involved.
Clare Lyons, Campaigns Manager for CAFOD said: “For millions of people in the developing world this is urgent, as rising global commodity prices make mineral exploitation an increasingly attractive option for many companies. We need legislation to open up the books of oil, gas and mining companies so poor communities can see where the money goes and hold their governments to account. These resources are finite – once they are gone they are gone forever – so there is no time to waste.”
