• How the Company manages its business to ensure CR is integral to its overall business strategy;
• How and why the Company supports 'reasonable regulation';
• Its ongoing successes in tackling illicit trade;
• How employees are supported during restructuring;
• An interview with the Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Foundation;
Participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project's Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration;
• Community partnerships to support sustainable development in West Africa; and the formation of a Stakeholder Panel to appraise the Company's approach and help direct its CR agenda.
It also stresses the assurance process of the company’s reporting, and the use of an independent assessment of the company's level of disclosure.
All of this sounds really great, but none of it makes the company's products less lethal for consumers. For those who believe in the ultimate sanctity of individual consumer choice, the idea of an ethical and responsible cigarette company probably makes sense, however difficult it is for others to accept.
Photo by superfantastic. Reproduced under creative commons.
Cigarettes are perhaps a special case, since they are the only product which will kill the consumer, when used as directed, if something else doesn't get them first. For other industries, the relative vice or virtue of their products is much harder to define. One intriguing industry is gambling and gaming. It is one of those industries whose members are regularly screened out of ethical investment funds on the basis that they are 'bad' companies with harmful and unethical products. The ironies involved in this are multiple. The ethical investment industry has roots in a number of faith-based organisations, yet what are among the most enduringly popular methods by which Churches raise funds themselves? Yes, bingo and raffles. Public sector organisations frequently pledge only to invest their money in ethical funds, but what is a key public fund-raising strategy throughout the World? Yes, the use of state lotteries. The investment industry includes numerous ethical investment funds run by companies whose other investment products are virtually indistinguishable from gambling, and in the case of 'spread betting' based investments and 'contracts for difference' are literally gambling. Servicing the tendency to gamble amongst individual consumers is deemed unethical, yet as the 'credit crunch' has demonstrated, institutionalised gambling has been at the core of commercial and government financial strategies for many years.
This isn't to defend gambling and gaming as 'good' but just to highlight that there can often be only slender differences between what is and is not viewed as ethically acceptable. If a person walks into a casino, has an experience which results in them having less money, but they enjoy that experience – what is the difference between a person who spends an evening watching a concert, movie or play? The critics will oint to the dangers of gambling addiction and its capacity to ruin the lives of the consumer. This is a valid point, but it raises the question of whether the business is ultimately responsible for the misuse of a product by the consumer. Many products can become addictive in ways that harm the addict. As well as the obvious products such as drink or prescription drugs, you could include food, coffee or the internet. Does the addictive tendencies of some consumers make a particular product ethically worse?
What about how the product is made as a basis for judging whether or not it is 'good'? This is the thinking behind the ISO 14000 Environmental Management System, which assesses the virtue of a company on the basis of its management of environmental impacts rather than on the actual nature of those impacts or the nature of the product and the uses to which it is put. This again sounds very rational until it raises the prospect of an environmentally accredited nuclear missile.
There is an ultimate question to decide whether or not a product is 'good' which is 'is the product sustainable?' The difficulty is, this is an unanswerable question. An individual product (just like an individual company) cannot be abstracted from the production and consumption system and society of which it is a part. We can make reasonably informed judgements about whether particular products, technologies or companies are more sustainable than others, but since sustainable development is a collective journey without a specific destination, there is no meaningful way to decide when an individual product, person, company or society has arrived at sustainability.
Marketers, consumers, investment analysts and the media all seem to hunger for simple definitions of good and bad products and companies, but the reality is far more complex and messy. Perhaps one answer is to follow the example of one of Imperial Tobacco's competitors who have sought to become more open about the nature of their product and have adopted a 'Harm Reduction' strategy and appointed a specialist manager to drive it through. Interestingly this echoes the sentiments of one of the great green business pioneers, Anita Roddick. She became alarmed at the tendency of the media to simplistically brand them as 'enviromentally friendly' and pointed out in a very forthright way that BodyShop was like every other business in that it did environmental harm, the difference was in the effort BodyShop put into minimising and compensating for, that harm.
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