Here are the campaign materials produced in English by the Finnish ECA Campaign, and the presentation and the history of the ECAs in Finland and the Finnish ECA Reform Campaign.
The NEW report:
Day and Night at the Factory - Working conditions of temporary workers in the factories of Nokia and its supplier in southern China is a Case Study of the working conditions in Nokia's subcontractors in China. This study shows that Nokia has not effectively monitored compliance with its code of conduct and that employees are not given the opportunity to participate in its monitoring or implementation. In addition, in its joint venture and in the plants of its suppliers in China, Nokia does not completely fulfil the requirements of international labour conventions and China's labour legislation.
The Case of Aracruz Celulose in Brazil: Export Credit Agencies exporting unsustainability, a case study written by Brazilian NGO FASE-ES and produced and published by Finnish ECA Reform Campaign (pdf-file). It describes the severe environmental, health and social problems caused by Aracruz pulp mill and the large scale eucalyptus monoculture plantations. Aracruz Celulose and Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso are building at the moment another pulp mill under the name Veracel Celulose to Eunapolis, Bahia, Brazil with similar problems, so this case is a very acute one.
Great Leap Forward - or Backwards? Environmental and Social Impacts of the Finnish Trade with China (pdf-file)
- a report in English written by researcher Ms Ge Yun.
Transparency or High Risks? (pdf-file)
- a study in English on the profile in public information disclosure in the Export Credit Agencies written by Ms Leila Mustanoja.
Here is a briefing on the Export Credit Agencies and their work in Finland, and after that the History of the Finnish ECA reform Campaign.
EXPORT CREDITING IN FINLAND
Finnish exports benefiting from subsidies
At the end of the year 2002 the total amount of export credit guarantee liabilities (including offers) was 2 497,3 million euros.
Finnish exporting has traditionally been mostly investments on forestry sector, where the impacts have during the years been devastating and ruthless especially in Southeast Asia. Pulp and paper industry is not only an environmental problem when logging the primary forests, using pesticides and fertilizers in plantations, and polluting the environment with untreated emissions and effluents, but also a serious human rights problem when depriving the land of local communities, replacing food land with pulp plantations and causing social tensions in local level by prefering some groups of people from others. In certain areas such as in Indonesia companies tend to hire and transfer workforce from other regions thus imposing many social problems, such as prostitution, to the factory location. The transfer is done because local people are too attached to their forest and not so eager to clear cut them as the alien workers. All in all local community hardly ever benefits from these investments but suffer their consequences severly.
During the last few years big portion of the export guarantees and credits have gone to the telecommunication sector especially in China and the Philippines. The telecommunications has been taken as rather innocent and harmless form of industry. So far it has not been studied here, but previous experiences in the electronic industry have shown that it can also cause severe adverse impacts.
Latin-America and especially Brazil have been an growing market area in exports in all traditional Finnish export industries: forestry, energy and telecommunications. Both China and Brazil are examples of countries from which more information is needed. Unfortunately, the lack of information does not guarantee that problems faced with Finnish export credits in South-East Asia are solved in these new areas.
Institutions involved
Export credits are channeled through commerical banks nowadays. For equalisation of the interests banks may get OECD-term subsidies from government funds through state owned FIDE Ltd.
Finnish Export Credit plc manages also together with commericail banks the so called pre-mixed concessional credits (exempt from interest, OECD-DAC) whose interest subsidies come from the official development cooperation funds of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Finnfund Ltd grants credits to enforce developmental objectives by investments and it is a development finance company under the guidance of Development Policy Unit of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Export guarantees are granted through a state-owned company, a Special Financing Institution Finnvera Plc under the guidance of the Ministry for Trade and Industry, and it is also the official ECA of Finland. Ministry for Trade and Industry is coordinating Finnish participation in the harmonisation work presently progressing in the EU and OECD. Finnvera has seats in the Finnish delegations as well.
Nordic Investments Bank has all the nordic countries as shareholders. It provides several sorts of funding and takes actively part into the discussion on policy development at Nordic, EU and OECD level.
The History of the Environmental assessments in crediting and guaranteeing
In 1998, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland commissioned a study on "Environmental Assessment in Public Promotion of Exports and Investments to Developing Countries" (Tallskog et al. 1999) which revealed that Finnish export and investment support agencies did not have proper environmental and social impact assessment procedures nor acceptable information disclosure policies in place. Therefore, very little was known about the potential environmental and social impacts or risks of projects financed by the responsible agencies. The study only focused on the policies, procedures and guidelines of the export and investment support agencies but was not yet able to investigate their project portfolios nor the individual projects and their potential impacts. However, since the projects financed by export credits, guarantees and investment promotion funds often involve large investments in industrial production, machinery and infrastructure development, significant environmental and social impacts are likely. Some cases of severe environmental and social problems caused by e.g. forest industry sector projects for which Finnish export credits and guarantees have been granted have been brought to publicity by local and international NGOs.
Banks and Fide did not have any environmental guidelines nor expertise to assess such things. None of the information on projects is disclosed exept for the decisions of the concessional credits as they fall under the Act of Publicity in the government funds. Finnfund has to assess its projects carefully and has relatively extensive guidelines but it too does not employ real environmental experts either. They disclose some information on made decisions.
Finnvera and Finnish Export Credit have formulated their environmental guidelines according to OECD process. The environmental guidelines divide project applications in three categories A, B, and C like World Bank does. They demand an independent Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report according to international standards from A, (covering forestry, mining, energy production, and such), an environmental assessment from B (minor projects such as equiptments) but not from C (i.e. telecommunications). However they do not intend to disclose this information though they claim to demand the consultion of all the local stakeholders. The actual EIA is subscribed by the applicant.
Legal framework consists of the export guarantee act and degree and an act on special financial institutions.The export guarantee law was renewed in 2001. After the law came to effect 1.7.2001 the Ministry for Trade and Industry set a committee to solve the paradox of the new law calling for submiting under the Act of Publicity and at the same time respecting the bank secrecy in the publicity of the Environmental Impact Assessments. The committee made an compromise and supported the so called alternative 2 that the EIAs should be published after the guarantee decision and on the consent of the exporter. The committee report was then sent to a round for comments. Comments were asked mainly form the traditional stakeholders, but two NGOs got also the official request from the ministry to give comments. Some other NGOs made their statements also.
Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, Friends of the Earth Finland, Finnish League for Human Rights, Nature League and Advisory Board for Relations with Development Countries all supported the alternative 1 on immediate disclosure of EIAs after they have arrived to Finnvera. The industry and other stakeholders supported alternative 3 of keeping the situation as it is now. No one supported the alternative 2 of the compromise. Now the ministry is waiting for a decision of the Supreme Adminsitrative Court where Finnvera has filed a complaint on the request of the information by the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation.
Role of Finland in international cooperation
Finland is rather small player in the global field of export credits, but it should not be forgotten that it's influence is remarkable in some regions, and in some fields of industries. The procedures and policies of Finnish ECAs matter. Finland is also an active player in Nordic, EU and OECD arenas and as such, being a country of good environmental and social reputation, it should be put to actively promote more sustainable international procedures for export crediting.
The NGO campaign history in Finland
Finnish campaign to reform ECAs started actually already in the 1980's but more actively in 1991 when the first seminar under the title Finland and the Forests of the World was organized by Coalition for Environment and Development and FANC. In this seminar also the ECAs were questionned. Finnish NGOs had had an ongoing but sporadic dialogue with Finnvera, former Finnish Guarantee Board, for over ten years already but it has intensified during the last five years along the international NGO campaign.
Finnish campaign was officially set up in February 1999. The campaign sent a representative to attend the Washington NGO meeting in March 1999, after request from Heffa Schucking from Urgenwald, Germany. Finnish campaign has followed closely ever after the international campaigning and participated quite frequently also in the following international NGO meetings.
The campaign had organized some meetings with the ECA and government representatives and one public seminar prior the professional campaign starting December 2001. The first seminar was organised in the Parliament spring 2000, and Service Center for Development Cooperation, Kepa published an information leaflet on ECAs and international campaign at the same time. Seminar had a large and variable audience including people from export credit agencies. These meetings and the succes of the seminar have developed a rather good, direct, ongoing dialogue between NGOs and Finnvera and the Ministry. However, lack of resources made the campaign then rather sporadic and inconsistent.
Activists from various Finnish NGOs (Friends of the Earth Finland, Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, Service Centre for Development Cooperation, Nature League, DODO - for Living Nature in the Future) and from semi-governmental Advisory Board for Relations with Development Countries have participated to the campaign in different ways.
In December 2001 The Finnish ECA Reform Campaign got a grant from the US Mott Foundation to conduct a more professional and efficient reform campaign. During the first period (1.12.01 - 30.09.02) The campaign produced some basic campaign material (an information package on ECAs, a study on transparency and a study on ECA debt). The campaign also made the homepage and a small leaflet. In September 2001 the campaign organized two public seminars, the one about transparency (The Secret World of the Export Credits) and the other on Nordic Investment Bank (The Nordic Invisible Hand). In 2002 the Finnish ECA Reform Campaign got another two years of funding until September 2004 for now. The details of the present campaign can be found at this homepage in the section Action.