It’s testament to the sheer boys own adventurousness of this book that it took me thirty pages to work out it wasn’t fiction.

David Grann sets out to follow in the footsteps of Colonel Percy Fawcett, the “Shakleton of the Amazon.” In doing so, he weaves together his own personal journey and a biography of the Victorian explorer who charted much of what we now know about the world’s most impenetrable jungle.

Colonel Fawcett was convinced that hidden somewhere deep within the jungle was a huge pre-Colombian civilization often referred to in legend as ‘El Dorado’ but known to Fawcett simply as Z.

Through first hand accounts meticulously pieced together from Fawcett’s correspondence home and commentary of the day, Grann has almost invented a new genre – the autobiography/thriller.

If you’re interested in the history of the Amazon or simply a fan of old fashioned adventure stories then I’d recommend this highly.

We’ve all been there. You go to a party with a bunch of your mates. You meet a group of girls and spend the evening drinking and dancing.

And after that?

The end of the night comes round and you and your mates have all had one too many, the girls have drifted away and it’s time to go home. But wait. One of your mates (let’s call him China) is still there on the dance floor getting it on with the last remaining girl at the party. You have no choice but to to wait for him to cop off/get her number etc while your hangover slowly but surely begins to kick in.

And there we have the global economy.

It’s 2011 and most of us were ready to leave the party 3 years ago but we’ve been waiting for China to catch us up. And the reason that we haven’t been able to simply leave without him is oil.

Global recessions are not new. We’ve had and survived many of them before but there’s been something fundamentally different about this one. Usually a global recession is followed by a drop in the global oil price. As demand slows, the price of oil drops, and as it does so, it simultaneously enables industry to reboot and begin to build again. But this time we’re 3 years in and the oil price is still at $125 per barrel. Why? Because China’s still on the dancefloor.

China’s (and much of Asia’s) growing economies now account for nearly 50% of demand for global oil production, which has enabled the OPEC countries to maintain high oil prices despite the troubles in the Western economies. We are the glum teenagers sitting round the edge of the dance floor waiting for the music to stop.

But there are signs that the DJ may be winding down and about to play his last tune.

At last, China’s economy is showing signs that it may be faltering. If it does then lower demand for oil from the East will quickly follow and the oil price may begin to fall giving Western industry and agriculture a much needed break.

Global recessions will continue to come and go. But the growing influence of China and the rest of Asia it seems, has added a new dimension – the more people at the party, the longer it goes on for. Unfortunately, the longer it goes on for, the bigger the hangover.

This post also appeared as a guest blogpost on the SustainAbility website – here

A World Without Labels

Imagine a company which always paid its workers a fair wage, only sourced materials from sustainable sources, created minimal environmental impact and operated a system of offsets so as to be 100% carbon neutral.

How would this company convince you as an ethical shopper to buy its products?

Well, the way the market place currently works is that it would cover its packaging with third party labels – a fair-trade logo would cover the wages, an Forestry Stewardship Council or Rainforest Alliance label might cover the sustainability angle and a black footprint with a big fat 0% in it would support its carbon credentials.

But there seems to be something wrong if a company that is behaving in the most ethical way possible has to rely on others to make that known. By devolving responsibility to third parties, it is tacitly admitting to not being able to convince customers of all the good things it is doing alone. And at the same time, the company is missing an opportunity to associate its ethical behaviour with its own label. Why is that?

The simple answer that is often trotted out is that business can’t be trusted. The argument goes like this – business is inherently evil and will lie and cheat in any way possible to distract us from all the bad things it does in the pursuit of maximum profits, which is why we need third parties to continually scrutinise on our behalf as consumers.

But this now seems rather an old fashioned view of things.

First, let’s give credit where it’s due. Organisations such as Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance have been great standard bearers for the ethical consumer movement. They have brought many issues concerning social justice and environmental impact to the fore and for that, they should be applauded. But have they now served their purpose?

Let’s take an example. For a number of years Cadbury’s have supported a community project in Ghana called the Cocoa Partnership. Through education and micro-financing, Cadbury’s help farmers to increase their yields, improve their communities and generally live happier more prosperous lives. It costs them around £4.5m per year and they’ve signed up for 10 years. Doesn’t that sound great? Well, yes and that’s because it is. But had you ever heard of it before now? Probably not.

Compare that with Cadbury’s decision to ‘go Fairtrade’ in 2009. The motives of the Fairtrade movement are similar to those of the Cocoa Partnership. The mechanism is different. When Fairtrade get companies such as Cadbury’s to sign up, they must commit to a minimum price guarantee plus a little bit on the top called the ‘social premium’. This mechanism was designed when global commodity prices were low but now looks rather dated. The problem is that the minimum price guarantees for ingredients such as cocoa and sugar have been redundant for years because market prices have soared and they look likely to stay that way for the long term. So the overall cost to companies like Cadbury’s is only the social premium, which works out at less than one quarter of one cent per bar – considerably less than their commitment to the Cocoa Partnership. Cadbury’s use both mechanisms to commit investment to cocoa farming in Ghana, but because customers rarely look into the sums involved and prefer instead just to look for the labels, they risk missing the really good stuff. I bet you’d never heard about the Cocoa Partnership before now, whereas you thought you knew all about Fairtrade.

Herein lies a major problem for companies such as Cadbury’s, which are trying to act responsibly and deservedly take credit for doing so. Big chunky projects that can create truly sustainable progress in the developing world continue to go unnoticed because the marketplace is telling consumers to focus instead on the third party labels that aren’t nearly as effective in delivering change.

So what is the solution? The onus must fall on the big brands to take control of the agenda. There are now many many businesses engaging in truly innovative and creative programmes to bring about positive change within their supply chains. OK, they may not quite have reached the levels of the imaginary company I described earlier, but they are doing things that we need to know about.

Brands are very good at communicating with us when they’re offering a new product or an improved service and wouldn’t dream of relying on third parties to do that for them. So why not employ the same talents to telling us about the sustainable, ethical and great environmental stuff they’re doing too?

It’s a big step for most brands to open their doors and say ‘look, we were doing this badly before but now we’re doing it a whole lot better.’ But the time is right for them to do exactly that. It’s time that brands started showing consumers that they stand not just for monetary value but also for social and environmental value too and they shouldn’t need anyone else to do it for them.

Last week, I was at the Hay International Literary Festival and the very first event I attended was Lord Digby Jones (former head of CBI and ex-government Minister for Trade) in discussion with Sir Stuart Rose (creator of Plan A when formerly CEO of M&S). The topic was Can Big Business Be Truly Ethical?

Now “Ethical” can mean many things and the conversation flowed freely by way of such issues as boardroom renumeration, jobs for British industry and even the need for rather less legislation from government when setting the Social Responsibility agenda.

Rose gave us the statistic of the day – that 63 of the world’s richest 100 economic entities are companies not countries and thus the agenda for global development is more likely to be set by them. The developing world needs big business whether we like it or not.

I rather like Sir Stuart. He banged the drum for sustainable business models, the need for big business leaders to listen to the young, who ‘get it’ better than they do and for the bigger principle of business having a wider responsibility. He at least talks a good game.

Unfortunately the same can’t said for the former Trade Minister. Jones represents the old guard. He continually patronised and insulted the audience with self aggrandising cliches and issue dodging platitudes. But it was one particular comment that gave me the greatest cause for concern.

When asked about the wider responsibility of big business in the developing world, Jones asked the audience why African and Asian governments didn’t do a better job of protecting their own. “What are these African governments doing while their people are supposedly being exploited by Western business?” He asked.

Well Digby, they’re probably sitting by their pools in their Monte Carlo apartments bought with the latest backhander paid into their Swiss bank accounts. Everybody (except Digby apparently) knows that African governments are notoriously corrupt. The idea that big business could simply rely on them to protect ordinary people would be laughable were it not so offensive.

It troubles me greatly that Digby Jones even holds, never mind publicly espouses these antiquated views. It troubles me even more that he sits on the advisory boards of twelve major British companies including HSBC, JCB, Harvey Nash and Jaguar as well as the UKTI and the House of Lords.

More than once during the discussion, Digby bemoaned journalists for continually portraying businessmen as the ‘bad guys’ in the press. He pointed to Sir Stuart as an example of a businessman who was quite the opposite. I couldn’t agree more, but it’s not Sir Stuart that we’re talking about, Digby.