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It's thumbs down for coke
19/12/2003
A DAVID versus Goliath battle in India has pitted a group of
impoverished peasant against one of global capitalism's mightiest
corporations and certainly the world's most powerful brand.
For almost a year now, protestors, many of them Dalits (former
untouchables) have been picketing a new Coca Cola plant in Kerala,
south India. Three hundred have been arrested but the struggle goes
on because it is over a substance that means life or death -
water.
A farmland site near the village of Plackimada once produced 50
sacks of rice a year and 1,500 coconuts, enough to give a peasant
family a poor living.
Now nothing grows because its 17 acres are occupied by the
Atlanta-based Coca Cola Corporation of America.
And since production of the famous drink began, farmers say land
yields around the plant have dropped alarming.
Shahul Hameed can hear the clinking Coca Cola bottles from where he
works in his fields. But since the factory has opened his harvest
has shrunk to around five sacks of rice and to just 200 coconuts a
year. This is not a living.
The agricultural workers now backed by their local council say the
1.5 million litres of water sucked into the plant through 65 bore
holes each day has lead to drastic drop in ground water levels and
the drying up of wells, ponds and even rivers.
The water Coca Cola use each day would satisfy the needs of 20,000
Indian people. But the villagers, who watch lorry load after lorry
load of Coke, Fanta, Sprite and, ironically, a drink called
Thums-Up, leave the plant each day they, sometimes have to walk six
miles for water.
Their feelings are summed up by Shahul who told an environmental
pressure group: "Coke managed to acquire all the lowest lying land
in the area. After digging a series of deep wells they have taken
all the water. It is downright theft."
Understandably the men from Atlanta are fighting their own corner
hard. They want to stay in India where the market for carbonated
drinks is massive with sales of 6,540 million bottles a year, or
six per head of the population.
They deny allegations of dire environmental vandalism and blame
poor rainfall. They say 1,231 mm of rain fell in 2000; 1,147 mm in
2001 but only 670 in 2002.
They also point out that they send tankers of clean water out to
the villages each day.
At first the poor farmers seemed isolated. The Kerala government
held rallies in favour of Coca Cola and even the local council
backed the US giant.
But the protests persisted aided by a claim that the sludge the
plant created was contaminated with lead and cadmium. Coca Cola
were allowing local farmers use this waste on their fields as
fertiliser. But peasants claimed it gave them sores and coconut
palms began to die. Tests showed that while the pollutants in the
sludge came within Indian government standards, it should be
classed as a hazardous substance.
The local council changed sides. It revoked Coca Cola's licence to
operate even though the company paid 700,000 rupees (about £7,700)
a year to them for it.
The company is appealing the decision and for the present
production, and protests, continue.
But anti-Coke felling is now India wide uniting activist from the
right-wing nationalist BJP to the People's War band of Maoist
guerillas fighting in east India. Both have called for a boycott
after Coca Cola, and this time, its rival, Pepsi, where hit be
another whammy.
Tests on twelve of their best selling drinks brands by the green
pressure organisation, the Centre for Science and the Environment
(CASE), found that they contained 30 to 36 times more insecticides
and pesticides that allowed under European Economic Community
safety limits.
The drinks corporations denied this and, at least at first, so did
the Indian government. But they did their own tests and admitted
that while the drinks did comply with Indian safety standards, nine
of them were in breach of the EEC minimum.
What this appeared to reveal was that the water system in India has
been serious polluted after years of using dodgy fertilisers and
pesticides supplied by western multinationals. The same water
system, of course, is used by Coke and Pepsi in their Indian made
products.
MPs in the Indian parliament promptly banned sales of the brands in
their restaurants and cafes while outside political mobs tore down
or burnt posters of Bollywood stars who advertise the Coke and
Pepsi brands including Sharuk Khan, Hirithik Roshan, Aamir Khan and
Koreen Kapoor.
Coke sales have slumped 11 per cent and the company is well on the
back foot.
Thus the drink that conquered the world, that first appeared 1886
as a headache remedy, in the year 2003 it is beginning to live up
to its original image for its multi-billionaire owners.
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