Coca Cola’s operations have been blamed for exacerbating or causing stress on local water resources in some less developed countries. Review and discuss the evidence.
The Earth’s hydrological cycle is a closed system but the population of the world is constantly expanding, increasing water stress in some areas. Even in the UK there is a pressure on the water supply in the south east and it is only going to increase over the next decade or two due to our changing society and lifestyles, such as one-person dwellings which use much more water than multi-person.
Water is going to become a major international issue in years to come and what used to be a debate about oil resources in the 20th century is going to evolve in the 21st. Problems are already critical such as in the developing world, one in every five people are without safe water and a sixth of the whole world’s people lack access to clean water. In addition, half of the total population of developing countries do not have adequate sanitation – that is a third of the people in the world.
A lack of water has been proven to cause many nasty diseases such as scabies and leprosy and it is predicted that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population will live in regions where water supplies are under stress, but use will increase by 40%, and this could lead to military conflict.
From here this essay is going to analyse the affect of the multinational company, Coca Cola, specifically on India and around happenings that are causing contention in the region of Kerala.
A report in the Guardian by Paul Brown (2003) describes how Coca Cola’s plant in Kerala is the largest in India and in 2003 was accused of both drying up the land in its vicinity, and also poisoning the area with sludge that the company claims is fertiliser. It is the largest plant as the state has become the company’s fastest growing market. The water shortage, however, has meant that Coca Cola took the action of sending water tankers around the nearest villagers so that they could have their minimum water needs. The company denies all allegations that it is its use of the underground aquifer that is causing the shortage but “the charity Action Aid says the crisis facing the once prosperous farming area is an example of the worst kind of inward investment by multinational companies in developing countries”. The report goes on to give evidence that since the Coca Cola bottling plant moved into Kerala in 1998, agricultural land has been abandoned as the coconut groves and vegetable crops cannot grow without enough water.
Even more alarmingly, the sludge referred to previously that the company were trying to pass off as fertiliser was, on the same day as this article was released, proven to contain high levels of lead and cadmium, both of which can be extremely harmful, especially in children, yet Coca Cola was encouraging people to smear it over their precious agricultural land and contaminate their soils with it. When the people no longer wanted the sludge, the company would try to give it away, and when this failed they would reportedly dump in it dry riverbeds. In defence of Coca Cola, the vice-president of Coca Cola India retorts that the company only uses a maximum of 600’000 litres a day, not the reported 1 million, and that before they built the plant the company undertook and Environmental Impact Assessment. Conspiratorially, they declined to make this report available.
On the same day as Brown’s report in the Guardian, a similar one was published in the Independent (Vallely et al), which began by describing a local farmer’s struggle to grow even a fifth of the produce that he was three years previously, before the plant moved in. This report announced that Coca Cola are extracting “up to 1.5 million litres of water a day” and shocks readers with the news that the company bottles branded mineral water at the site while locals have to walk for miles to collect water as they have no chance of being able to afford Coca Cola’s high prices and the scraggy ends of the water in their own wells are not of a good enough quality to use for washing, drinking or cooking. The condition of the water is seconded in a BBC article by Charles Havilland (2003).
Vallely et al continue with their news that six months after the factory opened the villagers started to complain to the local government, but they were seemingly ignored as the powers that be were convinced that the provision of jobs and services were far outweighing the complains of a few. The fact that other jobs were being lost in agriculture and farming as there was not enough work to go around due to the water shortage was overlooked. It will come about later that they will have a change of opinion as times goes on.
The Independent’s report goes on to describe how 85 lorry loads of soft drinks leave the plant each day, which amounts to enough water to meet the needs of 20’000 people. Again in this report, as in the Guardian, Coca Cola defends itself with the tankers of free water that it provides to the villagers, although it is for the bare minimum of their needs, and adds that they are in the development stage of employing a system to harvest rainwater. I find that this is an interesting theory, but seeing as more of their justifications are based on the fact that the local water shortages are due to a lack of rainfall (stipulated in another Guardian article later on in the year by Vidal), how effective and cost-wise do they believe this rainwater system is going to be?
Moving forward in time, an article from the BBC in January 2005 informs readers of protests being carried out nationwide across India against Coca Cola in a desperate bid to make them leave. This comes after global news reported on the findings of contamination in Coca Cola’s drinks products. In this way, not only are they creating a water shortage and causing issues of pollution in the agricultural lands of India, they are doing it to produce a sub-standard product, which they are then selling to the nation that it is taking advantage of in the first place. However in this BBC article Coca Cola once again defends itself, this time claiming that the company “had won acclaim for its approach to water management.”
Finally, another piece from the BBC in August 2005 announced that the Pollution Control Board of the southern state of Kerala had ordered Coca Cola to close its bottling plant for “breaching environmental regulations”. The company had not been able to disclose the amount of cadmium that was present in its waste products and so the ruling was given, no doubt to the joy and relief of the local people.
The problem of Coca Cola is in no way only focused on India, as it may have been portrayed here, it is only that this is one of the most reported and most significant events of the multinational company’s bullish ways. The Guardian published a report by Nick Mathiason on 19th March 2006 reminds readers of how global the problem is of big companies going to developing countries and convincing them that giving them space and resources is going to benefit them more than cause problems and issues. Latin America has been targeted, along with farmers in Rajasthan who have not been able to irrigate their fields since Coca Cola established a bottling plant there.
An undated paper by Sampath et al makes the point that Coca Cola seem to have no sense of sustainability, especially no doubt in places where they can swoop in, use as much as they possibly can, seeming to literally squeeze the areas dry, and then move on to sunnier climates (or indeed wetter ones) when the going gets tough, leaving the local people to suffer. Obviously if this were actually the case then governments would not let this happen and they would be able to see through the company’s intentions, but the worry lies in whether this in fact is the case.
My opinion on Coca Cola’s responsibility for causing water stress in developing countries is summarised perfectly by this statement from Schenck (2004): “it does seem ridiculous that water should be pumped out of a place which has scarce ground water and shipped to the US for a profit. The fact that each gallon of bottled water takes two gallons to produce makes this even more awful.”
References:
Articles:
Brown P, 2003 “Coca-Cola in India accused of leaving farms parched and land poisoned” The Guardian [www] http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,12559,1005564,00.html (January 2nd 2008)Vallely P, Clarke J and Stewart L, 2003 “Coke adds life? In India, impoverished farmers are fighting to stop drinks giant ‘destroying livelihoods’” The Independent [www]http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article97574.ece (January 2nd 2008)
Havilland C, 2003 “Coca Cola challenged in Kerala” BBC, [www] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3125520.stm (January 2nd 2008)
Vidal J, 2003 “Coke on trial as Indian villagers accuse plant of sucking them dry” The Guardian, [www] http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4800311-111087,00.html (January 2nd 2008)
BBC, 20th January 2005 “Cola companies told to quit India” [www] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4192569.stm (January 2nd 2008)
BBC, 19th August 2005 “Coke told to close Indian plant” [www] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4167606.stm (January 2nd 2008)
Mathiason N, 2006, “Coke ‘drinks India dry’” The Observer, [www] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1734036,00.html (January 2nd 2008)
Papers:
Sampath A, Kedarnath B, Ramanujam C, Haidery H, Rao R, Arunachalam R, Govindaraju S, Thirumalavan V and Jeet V, “Water Privatisation and Implications in India” Association for India’s Development [www] http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/aidaustin/water/water_privatization.pdf
Schenck I, 2004, “Thirsty?” [www] http://www.personal.psu.edu/ins5000/english30/thirsty.pdf
