Good Water, Bad Cola?
By C.R. Bijoy
08 February,
2008
Tehelka
When TERI (The Energy and Resource Institute) gave a “clean chit” to Coca Cola in India last week, the media reported it dutifully. TERI’s study found no pesticide in the water used for making soft drinks. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) retorted that “TERI has not tested the final product, which we drink. The CSE study in 2003 and 2006 tested bottles of colas and found pesticides above safe limits in the drinks.” As if on cue Tim Slottow, the executive vice-president and CFO of University of Michigan, informed Jeff Seabright, Coca Cola’s vice-president (Environment & Water Resources) expressing satisfaction and that “the University of Michigan will continue to do business with Coca Cola at this time”.
The doubting fizz drinkers are now expected to repose faith in the globally battered Coca Cola and their products. Does it matter if water used in making soft drinks does not contain pesticide? If this were true, how did Coca Cola’s products test positive for pesticide in the CSE studies and when tested by the NK Ganguly Committee of the Union health ministry of the Government of India? TERI not testing the soft drinks for pesticide now becomes a handy tool to skip correlating the qualities of water processed from raw water with the fizz themselves. TERI’s defence could be, “That was anyway not part of the terms of reference for the study.” But what has the University of Michigan to do with Coca Cola in India? Are ‘made in India’ Coca Cola’s products now to be supplied in that university’s campus? What’s the basis of the TERI report?
Either the quality of water processed from raw water has improved in the last few years due to the exposes; or the production process increases pesticide content in the soft drinks where 3.8 litres of water goes to make a litre of soft drink. The TERI study is also not in response to the problems that Coke faces in a number of its 49 plants in India — particularly Plachimada (Kerala), Mehdiganj (Uttar Pradesh), or Kala Dera (Rajasthan) where local communities have been protesting. The Coke plant in Plachimada has remained shut since 2004. The TERI study is not in response to CSE’s finding of pesticide in Coke products; nor is it about groundwater or community concerns around the affected land and peoples.
The TERI study seems to be an effort to restore market confidence in Coca Cola; particularly in the US. Students in the US, the UK and Canada have been applying pressure on Coca Cola to end its abuses particularly in India and Colombia. Over 20 colleges and universities in the US have taken action against Coca Cola. Active campaigns to ban Coca Cola from campuses exist in at least 30 colleges and universities. Rutgers University in New Jersey decided not to renew Coca Cola’s exclusive beverage contract in 2005. New York University, the largest private university in the US, instituted a similar ban, joining Rutgers University; Bard College in New York; Carleton College in Minnesota; Lake Forest College and the College of DuPage, both in Illinois; Oberlin College in Ohio; and Salem State College in Massachusetts. Other prominent US universities that The study is a result of campaigns to ban Coke from 30 American college and university campuses have banned Coca Cola are University of Illinois and the Santa Clara University in California.
THE CAMPAIGN by the Student Coalition to Cut the Coca Cola Contract forced the University of Michigan to temporarily suspend purchasing of Coca Cola products beginning January 1, 2006 making it the tenth US University to put on hold the sale of Coca Cola’s products in its campus. Both the University of Michigan and NYU were Coca Cola’s largest campus markets in the US. Coke’s annual contracts with the University of Michigan alone were worth around $ 1.3 million in sales (2004). The ban spread beyond the US when the University of Guelph of Canada and the University of Manchester in England voted to boot out Coca Cola products. The genesis of the students’ actions was the conspicuously bad human rights and environmental practices of Coca Cola, particularly the improper bio-waste disposal, polluting groundwater, depleting water resources and allowing pesticides into products in India, and the questionable labour practices in Colombia. But Coca Cola persistently rubbished these allegations.
In 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund, a non-profit human rights organisation, and Sinaltrainal (National Union of Food Workers), a Colombian labour union and the United Steelworkers of America, filed a lawsuit in a Florida court against Coca Cola and two of its bottlers, as they were believed to be linked to the murder of eight union leaders of Coca Cola’s plants in Colombia since 1989 as part of union-busting efforts in collaboration with the paramilitaries. The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), a Geneva-headquartered international federation of 336 trade unions in 120 countries with over 12 million workers, secured an agreement with Coca Cola to request the United Nations through its International Labour Organisation (ILO), to conduct such an investigation on February 28, 2006. This investigation was initiated in April 2006.
In the case of human rights and environmental violations in India, the independent investigation was precipitated by the action of Dispute Review Board of the University of Michigan to suspend purchase of Coca Cola products citing concerns that the company may have violated the University’s Vendor Code of Conduct. Coca Cola failed to comply with the December 31, 2005 deadline to meet the demand for independent investigations by selecting an auditor and agreeing upon a detailed protocol for the audits. The upshot of all these is the ‘The Independent Assessment of Coca Cola Plants in India’ by New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute that resulted from the agreement signed between Jeff Seabright (vice-president, Environment and Water Resources, The Coca Cola Company, USA) and Leena Srivastava, (executive director, TERI) and Michael T. Lesnick (senior partner, Meridian Institute, Dillon, Colorado, USA) on 30 August 2006 with the project initiation in September and final report set for March, 2007.
THE TERI report indicts Coca Cola on a number of counts despite the study itself, by agreement, being limited to “assessment of Coca Cola (India)’s current water resources management practices” that includes also ascertaining “the impact of pesticides on the quality of the intake water”. The report says that the company’s “assessment of water availability in the vicinity of a bottling operation is determined by business continuity” alone not taking in such essential factors as environment, water availability/quality or community concerns. It does not even attempt to examine whether there exists any relationship, if at all, between the pollution of groundwater (that it records) with that of the activities of Coca Cola. While recording the local community’s perceptions that there has been a drastic and rapid deterioration in the quality of groundwater since the commencement of the operations of the plant in most instances, TERI actually declared its intention not to do so. While harping on the relatively lower share in water usage by Coca Cola in the total water usage in the locality, what is possibly hidden is that Coca Cola is biggest water drainer in the area.
TERI also does not check for the adverse impact on groundwater quality by the rapid extraction of water by Coca Cola plants. It also remarkably equates water usage by Coca Cola, a producer of non-essential luxury commodities, with that of the water usage by essential agriculture and other industries. Coca Cola refused to show TERI some of its own vital documents and its own Environmental Impact Assessment reports “due to reasons of legal and strategic confidentiality”. That such documents would not be made available to TERI was anyway part of the agreement signed between them. Then why did TERI agree to do the study at all? Read with Coca Cola India Limited being one of TERI’s sponsors to the extent of 0.3% (2001-02), 0.08 % (2002-03), and 0.05% (2004-05) of the total annual revenues of TERI, makes the TERI report suspect.
Of the six plants selected for analysis, two sites were selected for community protests namely Kaladera and Mehdiganj. The more well-known Plachimada plant was left out as the plant is “not in peration”. TERI analysed the intake of raw water, process water and wastewater from Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) and Sewage Treatment Plant (STP). It found no pesticides in the intake and process water used to make beverages and in treated effluent water as well. But the intake raw water of the four out of six plants when compared with the Indian Standard for drinking water (IS 10500: 1991, BIS) “showed exceedance of total alkalinity. These were HCCBPL Kaladera, Mehndiganj, Nabipur, and Pirangut. Other parameters exceeding standards included barium at HCCBPL Nemam, Nabipur, and Sathupalle; nitrate, iron, and pH at Sathupalle; lead, aluminium, and turbidity in HCCBPL Pirangut; and fluoride and TDS (total dissolved solids) at HCCBPL Kaladera.” TERI made no attempt to correlate the regional groundwater quality to the operations of the Coca Cola plant, but merely recommended that “there is a need to carry out a further detailed study to establish/rule out the reasons for such presence.” TERI also recorded the perceptions of stakeholders including the local community in all the six cites and found them to be “in conformity to the results obtained from the detailed technical assessment of groundwater resources”. Does then this not indicate that the local communities have been after all largely correct in their perceptions of problems if not the causes?
This goes
against the usual refrain of Coca Cola that all these are “motivated”
allegations. TERI acknowledges that “the stakeholders recorded
concerns related to unregulated water extraction by Coca Cola plants,
especially in case of Kaladera” and that the local community
“perceives that Coca Cola has deep bore wells that continuously
withdraw water from groundwater aquifers unlike borewells used for
irrigation that are relatively shallow and do not get regular supply
of electricity.” The study also consistently found quality problems
with ‘raw water’ in the villages. While the TERI report
concludes that the “plants generally meet the government regulatory
standards”, it is silent on whether the government regulatory
standards are set for different parameters and are satisfactory. The
TERI report raises more questions than offer answers.
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