Investment news
Publications

On investment
About investment
Investment bibliography

On Export Credit Agencies
About Export Credit Agencies
Joining forces to reform ECAs
Cleaning up ECAs in Europe
OECD: ECAs fail to reform themselves
ECA Factfile


Home

After nearly five years of discussions in response to OECD and G8 mandates for environmental reform of ECAs, the draft environmental agreement negotiated in the OECD Export Credit Group is insufficient and is unlikely to affect significantly the environmental performance of ECA projects. Social performance is not addressed at all. The agreement lacks even the most minimal criteria of international good practice in environmental assessment and falls short on two main principles:

• Transparency: It fails to include specific commitments to consult affected communities and other stakeholders and to publicly release environmental information prior to final decisions on financial or guaranteeing support.

• Common, binding, independently verified standards and procedures: The proposed agreement asks Members to review a project's environmental information against the benchmarks of any of a number of international standards. This means that an ECA can choose to apply – or not apply – virtually any standards it wants to any given project, as it sees fit.

The US, that has stronger requirements on both of these issues, has refused to dilute its standards by signing the draft OECD Recommendation on Common Approaches on the Environment and Officially Supported Export Credits. The rest of the OECD members therefore decided to adopt the Recommendation on a unilateral and voluntar y basis and to review implemention in the fall of 2003. European NGOs consider the OECD pseudo agreement as a sham and are asking European governments to push for real reform.