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Mark Malloch-Brown's Business and Sustainable Development
Commission has contacted 1,500 CEOs over two years to persuade
them that embracing development can boost their bottom line, and
will wrap up its work at the Davos World Economic Forum on
Tuesday.
"We feel we've lit a flame here," said Malloch-Brown, a British
former U.N. deputy secretary-general who will now spearhead
campaigning to keep Britain in the European Union.
His 37-strong group included leaders of firms such as Unilever,
Merck, Mars, Alibaba, Safaricom and Aviva as well as academics
and civil society leaders, urging businesses to adopt U.N. goals
for 2030 such as ending poverty and hunger and to slow climate
change.
In a report last year, the commission said companies could
unlock at least $12 trillion in market opportunities by 2030 and
create up to 380 million jobs by focusing on transport, energy,
cities, agriculture, food and health.
Malloch-Brown told Reuters the biggest barrier was CEOs'
mindsets.
"CEOs are still terribly preoccupied by quarterly results," he
said. "The hardest argument is to persuade them to persuade
their shareholders to let them think - at least in a portion of
their business - in the long term."
Companies such as Unilever and Mars found it was much better to
pay African farmers fair, stable prices for cocoa and focus on
quality chocolate rather than risk putting farmers out of
business with low prices, he said.
And insurer Aviva is developing benchmarks so that investors
"can judge whether a company is having an impact" in terms of
the sustainable development goals, he said.
Another initiative was to develop more "blended finance" for the
global development goals involving both public and private
sources.
Malloch-Brown said construction firms could tap a vast market
for low-cost houses in cities such as Mumbai or Lagos rather
than building a "few mansions in Weybridge", a prosperous
English town.
Commission member Amy Jadesimi, managing director of Nigeria's
Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base, said the opportunities in
emerging economies were huge.
A 330-metre (1080 ft) long Floating Production, Storage and
Offshore vessel built for Total will arrive in Nigeria this week
from South Korea for completion work before deployment at
Nigeria's 200,000 barrel per day Egina field.
"We're sending a signal to the world that you can do the most
expensive industrial projects in the world here in Africa,"
Jadesimi said.
(Reporting By Alister Doyle)
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