PAUL WILENIUS:                Anti-globalisation protesters 
attack a symbol of capitalism during last summer's riots. Western police 
forces are braced for another long hot summer of clashes this year as world 
leaders gather for the Earth Summit in South Africa and the World Economic 
Summit in Canada, under pressure to do less for big corporations and more 
for the environment and the poor.  

The government wants to be seen to be green by supporting measures which 
protect the environment and help the poorest countries.  However, campaigners 
say this will never succeed unless the government is prepared to take on 
big global business.

The first Earth Summit in Rio ten years ago appeared to forge agreements 
to save the planet and map out a better future for developing countries. 
Although Britain has just signed up to the Kyoto Treaty aimed at cutting 
greenhouse gas emissions, campaigners say it means nothing while the Americans 
remain outside it. Environment Ministers are off to Bali this week to pave 
the way for the second Earth Summit in Johannesburg, but environmentalists 
are pessimistic about its chances of success. 

ZAC GOLDSMITH:                The Earth Summit was the 
biggest ever meeting of world leaders to deal with the environmental crisis 
ten years ago and everyone, I can safely say that everyone's hopes were 
huge at that time, they thought the problem was going to be solved.  Actually 
what's happened is that none of the goals set at the World Summit have 
been met, on the contrary the environment is in a worse condition, more 
people are living in poverty and so on and so it has been a failure. 

TONY JUNIPER:                We've seen a shift in political 
and diplomatic commitment after Rio away from global sustainable development 
treaties towards the promotion of trade liberalisation and global economic 
deregulation and that's where this summit in Johannesburg is going to have 
its biggest test. Are the governments turning up there going to recommit 
to the sustainable development priority that they said they signed up to 
in Rio de Janeiro or are they going to continue with the process of corporate 
globalisation which is doing so much damage across the globe.

WILENIUS:                    There appears to be as 
much environmental damage and global poverty now, as there was then in 
Rio, but activists are more prepared to take on big business to help clean 
up the planet.

Environmental protesters are running a campaign to stop Esso - owned by 
the US oil giant Exxon - as they blame it for helping to torpedo the Kyoto 
global warming treaty. They say voluntary rules to try to control the actions 
of such big global corporations are not strong enough.  For them, the only 
way to stop such protests is for the next Earth Summit to come up with 
a tough, legally binding agreement to put the environment before trade.

Protesters have been blockading Esso forecourts, backed by stars from 
Jonathan Creek and Absolutely Fabulous, to try to hit the company's sales.

STEPHANIE TUNMORE:            'Stop Esso' recently had a day 
of action in the UK where they picketed four-hundred petrol stations in 
the UK and the campaign has also gone global, we have 'Stop Esso' campaigns 
now in Canada and in the USA and recently in Germany. For a long time people 
have been angry and upset about climate change, but it's a very complex 
issue, it's very difficult to point at somebody and say it's your fault. 
Having pointed out what Esso is doing, their role in this, it's given the 
customer a choice, it's given them something to do, it's given them someone 
to blame and we are getting a lot of support from customers.

PAUL MERCER:                There is a tendency to believe 
boycott campaigns are relatively unsophisticated but in reality they're 
run by very professional campaigners, they pick out very limited objectives 
that they know the companies can agree to without having to suffer too 
great a loss, and what they aim for because markets are very competitive 
these days is only a few percentage change in sales, because they know 
that will force the company into backing down and agreeing to their demands.

WILENIUS:                    Despite the protests, 
there's little sign of Esso backing down. The company's defiant, bluntly 
refuting the accusations levelled at it by the campaigners that is doesn't 
care about the environment.
  
GORDON SAWYER:            The charge that somehow we determined 
the US Government's decision to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol is frankly 
rubbish.  Anyone who knows our company knows that we operate to the highest 
ethical standards wherever we are in the world. Of course we take the issue 
of climate change seriously and we're taking action in our company. We 
are taking actions to improve energy efficiency in everything that we do 
today and we are also investing in energy solutions for tomorrow.

WILENIUS:                    The nerve centre of the 
'Stop Esso' campaign is inside the London HQ of Greenpeace, but it's also 
backed by the Friends of the Earth. These groups want legally binding corporate 
accountability rules from the forthcoming Earth Summit, to force global 
companies to behave better. They want big fines to give them real teeth 
as they feel the existing voluntary controls have failed.

GOLDSMITH:                There's no sign yet that voluntary 
methods have worked and this was first proposed during Rio by Bush Senior 
who promised that America would voluntarily reduce,  cut its greenhouse 
emissions to nineteen-ninety levels by the year two-thousand.  In fact 
by the year two-thousand emissions had increased by twenty per cent.

JUNIPER:                    The Bali agenda and the 
Johannesburg agenda will be dominated by calls for voluntary agreements, 
for partnership arrangements but what is actually needed is some really 
tight regulatory frameworks which can start bringing some of the errant 
players in the sustainable developments sphere back to the table in a way 
where they're going to start behaving in a, in a way which is more aligned 
with some of the treaties and speeches of politicians.

RUTH LEA:                    I don't think the way 
forward is to have these international agreements being forced on global 
companies because at the end of the day what is that saying?  It's saying 
that for the, particular national governments, they cannot decide what 
sort of relationship they want with particular global companies.  In other 
words it's stripping away national sovereignty from national governments. 
   

WILENIUS:                    For the campaigners running 
the Esso boycott the fate of the planet is much more important than the 
sovereignty of national governments. For them, Western governments must 
move in the direction of putting the environment before trade.

JUNIPER:                    It seems quite logical 
to us given the way in which the globalisation experiment is harming the 
environment that there needs to be a clear political statement that the 
environmental rules take precedence over the trade rules. We're very, very 
far from that being the case but again this is one of the jobs that the 
governments have to do in Johannesburg is to rebalance the international 
machinery so that the environment does get a chance.

WILENIUS:                    A coffee bar in the Bluewater 
shopping mall in Kent seems an unlikely place to find a trade battleground. 
Yet the fair trade coffee on sale here is part of a growing campaign to 
persuade environmentally concerned consumers to pay a little more for goods 
from Third World producers.

The choice for many coffee drinkers is between a cafe latte and capuccino, 
but many environmentalists prefer coffee from a fair trade producers.  
Indeed, they feel it helps poorer countries to develop, by buying agricultural 
products from companies that care for the environment and their workers. 
They also accuse Western governments of hypocrisy, for insisting that Third 
World governments open up their markets, while spending billions supporting 
their own agriculture.
 
A new batch of coffee arrives at the Cafe Direct plant. The slightly higher 
prices for the coffee, is used to give producers who respect the environment 
and their workers more cash. Yet there's no sign the West is ready to scrap 
tariff barriers or even cut the huge subsidies given to its own producers. 
Some campaigners believe it's better to help small farms rather than encourage 
large scale production.

GOLDSMITH:                Eighty per cent of all malnourished 
children in the world today actually live in countries whose agriculture 
has already been geared towards export exactly as they were told to by 
the world bank and the IMF.  So it's not helping alleviate poverty, what's 
happening is that environments are being degraded across the board by bad 
agriculture, we're seeing countries plunged into debt in order to keep 
this, this lunatic economic system going.

LEA:                        Companies are for 
good, trade is for good, economic growth is for good, wealth creation is 
for good. And if you compare say countries in South-east Asia, countries 
like South Korea or Thailand or whatever, how did they grow out of poverty? 
 They grew out by trade. 

WILENIUS:                    Despite the contribution 
made by companies like Cafe Direct this can only have a limited impact 
as campaigners say the global food market is rigged to favour the rich 
countries. Farmers can produce cheap food and then send it out to undercut 
Third World producers, because they've been given huge subsidies by their 
own governments, in Europe and America. 

JOHN CRYER MP:                We keep hearing time and 
time again that the Common Agriculture Policy is going to be tackled not 
just by the British government but by the other governments in Western 
Europe and it simply never happens, it just carries on - that's deeply 
damaging to the developing world because we keep dumping this cheap food 
on the Third World.

LEA:                        And the problem with 
all this protectionism is that it keeps out developing countries food exports 
to the developed world and of course it's through exports, it's through 
free trade in those particular products that should enable some of these 
developing countries to grow and grow out of poverty.

WILENIUS:                    Campaigners say the problem 
for Western governments is they are inextricably linked to big global corporations. 
 So many protest groups have decided the only thing these companies and 
governments listen to is direct action.  Now there's a growing threat of 
more mass demonstrations here in Westminster and consumer boycotts.

MERCER:                    The reason direct political 
action is growing is because of a perception that large corporations are 
now more powerful than a lot of national governments and that one can't 
effect or increasingly one can't effect political change by campaigning 
within party political structures, one actually has to then target those 
corporations and that's the reason for the growth and the more that people 
perceive these corporations to be all powerful then the more that they're 
going to get targeted.

WILENIUS:                    But the first step for 
many is to try to persuade politicians to do more to help the environment 
and promote sustainable development. Both young and old campaigners are 
preparing for what is expected to one of the biggest ever lobbies of Parliament 
on June the nineteenth. Tens of thousands are expected to call for a fair 
trade system.

JUNIPER:                    We're hoping that thousands 
of people will turn out to the Houses of Parliament to bring to their MPs 
attention a set of concerns that are rarely debated in the democratic institutions 
in this country and that is about the assumption that free trade will end 
poverty, that free trade will protect the environment and that a deregulatory 
approach on the global economic stage is the right way forward.

WILENIUS:                    Protesters limber up 
for the big day with a dance in Leeds.  The environmental campaigners are 
all joining forces to demand changes to the world trading system and more 
action to save the planet. But there are fears this government may not 
be truly, madly, deeply committed to green policies and helping the poorest 
countries in the face of the might of the global corporations.

CRYER:                    The idea that globalisation 
is sort of a fact and you can't do anything about it, it leads to this, 
it leads to, to a feeling amongst Ministers I suspect that you can only 
kind of, play around at the margins, you can't do anything fundamental 
and you can.

WILENIUS:                    Tony Blair's government 
will need to do a lot more to convince campaigners that it's serious about 
green issues and helping the Third World.  Although the minority of violent 
protesters might be contained by the police, it could be a lot more difficult 
 to extinguish the passion of those battling for the future of our world.