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A Ronald Mcdonald Fantasy

On Corporate Responsibility: A Ronald McDonald Fantasy


McDonald's April 14 "Report on Corporate Social Responsibility" is a low- water mark for the concept of sustainability and the promise of corporate social responsibility. It is a melange of generalities and soft assurances that do not provide hard metrics of the company, its activities or its impacts on society and the environment.

While movements toward corporate transparency and disclosure are to be applauded, there is little of either in the report.

This is not a report about stakeholder rights, as McDonald's would have one believe. It is a report about how a corporation that's been severely stung by bad publicity, poor service and declining earnings now wants to plead its case to its critics. It states that critics don't want to make things better, but it ignores what their critics care about.

The McDonald's Social Responsibility Report presupposes that we can continue to have a global chain of restaurants that serves fried, sugary junk food produced by an agricultural system of monocultures, monopolies, standardization and destruction, and at the same time find a path to sustainability. Having worked in the field of sustainability and business for three decades, I can reasonably say that nothing could be further from the idea of sustainability than the McDonald's Corp.

The report states, "being a socially responsible leader begins a process that involves more awareness on the issues that will make a difference." Yet the company has known for decades that the food it serves harms people, promotes obesity, heart disease and has detrimental effects on land and water. On May 1, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report stating that childhood obesity and related diseases had doubled in the past 10 years, specifically citing high-fat fast-food as a cause. Addressing that one issue would make a difference.

McDonald's has known about the harmful effects of its food just as the...