Feature

McCharity for the world’s poor

The UN Children’s Fund has never been well off – but should it take money from just anyone? Geof Rayner reports on Unicef’s plans to team up with the fast-food McDonald’s Coporation

Founded in 1946 and working in 161 countries, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) has built a tremendous reputation for its support of early childhood programmes that bring better health, good nutrition, and clean water to children in the crucial first years of life. Its work in combating child poverty is exceptional, with thoughtful, well-researched reports from its Innocenti Centre in Florence, Italy.

It does all this within what, for a global organisation, is a very tight budget. Total income for 2000 was US$1,139m. The UK is its second largest donor.

Unicef has expressed its concern at the decline of its regular, unrestricted sources of funding. Given that the money it has at its disposal could never be enough, it has sought to expand its income from private sources, including alliances with companies such as British Airways, which raises money through passenger donations. Such fund-raising is non-controversial because BA does not market products to children.

But Unicef’s unlikely new ally is the McDonald’s Corporation, which does. With 30,000 worldwide restaurants serving 46 million customers a day, McDonald’s is the largest hamburger chain in the world. McDonald’s is liked by its young customers, who visit its restaurants for its ‘guaranteed quality’ bland, high-fat foods, supplemented by happy hats and plastic toys, which are usually tied in with Walt Disney films and assembled in the Far East for next to nothing.

While the company has not exactly fallen on hard times recently, growth is trailing its competitors. It has also been the focus of scathing critiques, and therefore it has even better reason for paying extra attention to social responsibility and to ‘looking good’ on its existing charity work for children. For example, each McDonald’s counter carries collection boxes for Ronald McDonald House Charities. RMHC has so far awarded more than $US320m in grants to good causes aimed at children.

McDonald’s have linked up with the UN before. The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) teamed up with McDonald’s and Disney to give ‘Millennium Dreamer’ youth awards. The company is currently is ranked ninth in the Fortune magazine list on the basis of socially responsible factors covering over 500 companies. It is trying – though the issue is whether it could ever try hard enough, given the products its serves and how it markets them.

Unicef and McDonald’s have now announced plans for a new fund-raising venture —World Children’s Day — for 20 November 2002. The date coincides with the anniversary of the UN adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

On the day, McDonald’s restaurants in 121 countries will raise money for local children’s organisations through a variety of activities and promotions developed by each restaurant. Unicef will be a beneficiary of the World Children’s Day effort in selected countries, including the US where McDonald’s will support the ‘Trick-or-Treat for Unicef’’ programme.

A letter to Unicef director Carol Bellamy by several dozen public health and children’s organisations in July asked her to immediately suspend the link. The protestors argue that ‘McDonald’s is a global leader in the marketing of junk food that is creating soaring rates of childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes, and that is disrupting traditional ways of food preparation in families and cultures’. They say the company, ‘is responsible for multimillion dollar ad campaigns that prod children to nag, whine and throw tantrums so that their parents will consent to buy them junk food. The company’s ad campaigns deliberately foment conflict between parents and children regarding food’.

The impetus for UN organisations to link up with business goes back to a strategy pioneered by secretary-general Kofi Annan, which sought to gain the support of the private sector for the goals of the UN, while throwing the UN’s support behind ‘responsible globalisation’. ‘Globalisation is a fact of life,’ said Annan. ‘But I believe we have underestimated its fragility. The problem is this. The spread of markets outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them, let alone to guide the course they take. What we have to do is find way of embedding the global market in a network of shared values.’

This strategy has provoked trouble before. In 1999 the UN Development Programme (UNDP) announced the Sustainable Development Facility (GSDF), a partnership with around 15 corporations. The GSDF was one of many partnerships with the private sector being pursued by the UN and many of its agencies under the umbrella of the Global Compact. The GSDF was to include Dow Chemical, mining giant Rio Tinto, energy conglomerate ABB, and biotechnology company Novartis.

Participating companies paid US$50,000 apiece to help underwrite the costs of a dialogue with the UNDP concerning the common ground between corporate objectives and sustainable development. Although the final shape the GSDF was to take was never made public, activists questioned whether sponsorship of the programme promised to brighten corporate images more than it would serve the needs of the world’s poor. Over 100 organisations signed a letter sent to the head of UNDP calling for GSDF to be abandoned, which indeed happened in June 2000.

It remains to be seen whether the protesters will get Unicef to back down. There is no doubt that Unicef needs the money — and that McDonald’s could deliver it. While there is nothing wrong with corporate social responsibility in principle, the question that the protesters have raised is whether the dividing line between responsible and irresponsible links has now been crossed.