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Sludge dirt on
Coca-Cola
By D Rajeev
PLACHIMADA - In the end it was the
"generosity" of Coca-Cola in distributing
cadmium-laden waste sludge as "free fertilizer" to
the tribes who live near the beverage giant's
bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that
proved to be its undoing. On Friday, the Kerala
State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) ordered the
plant shut down, much to the jubilation of tribal
leaders and green activists who had focused more
on the "water mining" activities of the plant
rather than its production of toxic cadmium
sludge.
"One way or another, this plant
should be shut down and the management made to pay
compensation for destroying our paddy fields,
fooling us with fake fertilizer and drying out our
wells," said Paru Amma, a tribal woman who lives
in this once lush, water-abundant area. Chairman
of the KSPCB, G Rajmohan, said the closure was
ordered because the plant "does not have adequate
waste treatment systems and toxic products from
the plant were affecting drinking water in nearby
villages" and that the plant "has also not
provided drinking water in a satisfying manner to
local residents".
Apparently, the
generosity of the Coca-Cola plant was limited to
distributing sludge and waste water free, and did
not extend to providing drinking water to people
seriously affected by its operations. In a
statement Saturday, Coca-Cola said it was
"reviewing the order passed by the chairman of the
Pollution Control Board", and that "going forward,
we are in the process of evaluating future steps,
including a judicial review".
The KSPCB
closure order was only the latest episode in a
see-saw battle between Coca-Cola and the
impoverished but plucky local residents ever since
the Atlanta-based company began operating its
US$25 million bottling plant in this village,
located in the state's fertile Palakkad district,
in 2001. Along the way, pollution control
authorities, political parties, the judiciary and
global environmental groups, starting with
Greenpeace International, became involved in the
dispute and Plachimada grew into a global symbol
of resistance by local people to powerful
transnational corporations trying to snatch away
their water rights.
Although the local
people had begun protesting against their wells
running dry months after the plant began
operations, serious trouble for the company began
a little more than two years ago when a local
doctor declared the water still available in the
wells unfit for consumption. In July 2003, a BBC
Radio-4 report, after carrying out tests at the
University of Exeter in Britain, pronounced the
sludge as dangerously laden with heavy metals,
especially cadmium and lead, and already
contaminating the food chain. The sludge also had
no value as fertilizer, the report said.
Cadmium is a known carcinogen which causes
kidney damage while exposure to lead can lead to
mental derangement and death, and is particularly
dangerous for children causing them severe anemia
and mental retardation. The BBC report quoted
Professor John Henry, a leading toxicity expert
and consultant at St Mary's Hospital in London,
warn of "devastating consequences for those living
near areas where this waste has been dumped and
for the thousands who depend on crops produced in
these [paddy] fields".
In August 2003, the
KSPCB ordered the plant to stop distributing
sludge to farmers, but then its official, K V
Indulal, charged with carrying out the
investigations, unexpectedly announced that he
found contamination levels "not beyond tolerable
limits". Allegations of bribery and corruption by
Coca-Cola followed and Indulal is presently under
investigation by the state's Anti-Corruption
Bureau, which carried out raids on his residence
and properties spread across three Kerala cities
earlier this month.
The Kerala High Court
initially supported the Plachimada villagers and
in a December 16, 2003 ruling, ordered Coca-Cola
not to mine water through its deep bore wells but
allowed the plant to draw water in amounts
comparable to that normally used for agricultural
or domestic purposes in the area. Coca-Cola
approached the court after the panchayat (elected
local body) canceled the plant's operating license
for mining water and a single judge ruled that the
state government had no right to allow a private
party to extract large quantities of ground water
which it deemed "property held by it (the
government) in trust".
But on April 7 this
year, a High Court bench allowed the plant to
extract up to 500,000 liters of water a day,
saying that existing laws on water ownership were
inadequate. The ruling angered NGOs and triggered
off a series of clashes outside the gates of the
plant between agitating local people and police.
"The High Court ruling is a great disappointment
to everyone concerned with Coke's abusive
practices around the world," said Corporate
Accountability International's executive director
Kathryn Mulvey in a statement.
Mulvey
predicted that resistance to Coke's practices in
Plachimada and throughout India would only grow.
"We join with community leaders and allies around
the world in calling on Coke to close the
Plachimada facility permanently, and to pay back
the community for the damage it has caused," she
said. Nevertheless, on the strength of the court
ruling, the plant resumed what were described as
"trial operations" on August 8 after the
561,000-liter capacity plant that manufactures
such brands as Coca-Cola, Limca and Fanta had lain
shut for 17 months.
Barely 10 days later,
on Friday, the KSPCB stepped in with its closure
order for inability to explain the high cadmium
levels and for failing to provide piped drinking
water to people whose wells had become
contaminated, as required by the body.
Internationally known environmental scientist and
activist, Vandana Shiva, who leads the New
Delhi-based, Research Foundation for Science,
Technology and Ecology, has alleged that after
Coca-Cola was restrained from dumping sludge or
distributing it as fertilizer, it had begun
injecting waste into dry boreholes and
contaminating deep-water aquifers.
It has
not helped Coca-Cola that the discovery of heavy
metal in the sludge in 2003 followed findings by
the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE),
another well-known, New Delhi-based non-government
organization, that nearly all colas and "mineral
water" produced in India contained unacceptably
large doses of commonly-used pesticides. The CSE
findings seriously dented the image of Coke and
its rival Pepsi, both of which were banned by
nationalist governments for decades in India and
allowed to return only when this country began a
process of economic reforms following a serious
balance of payments crisis in 1991.
Said
Veerendrakumar, member of parliament and editor of
the influential Mathrubhumi newspaper: "The fact
of the matter is that water from underground
sources is being pumped out free, bottled and sold
to our people to make millions for cola companies
while destroying the environment and damaging
public health".
"We welcome the order
shutting the factory down," said R Ajayan of the
Plachimada Solidarity Committee, which was largely
responsible for approaching the KSPCB. "We have to
continue to work with the state government to
ensure that Coca-Cola abides by the order and that
there are no more violations."
Coca-Cola
is already in deep trouble in India, its sales
having dropped 14% in the last quarter
(April-June), and the company is presently
undergoing major reorganization and changing its
top leadership in an effort to stem plummeting
popularity. The state government has announced
that it will also challenge in the Supreme Court
Coca-Cola's claim to extract water, taking
advantage of the fact that existing laws on
groundwater ownership are vague.
"We
welcome the actions by the state agencies in
Kerala to stop the arrogance and criminal
activities of the Coca-Cola company,'' said Amit
Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an
international campaigner. "These actions are major
victories for the community of Plachimada, which
has all along been demanding that the state do
what it is supposed to do - safeguard the
interests of the community."
Sunita
Narain, who led the CSE's high-profile
investigation and exposure of the presence of
pesticides in colas manufactured in India, said
the real value of the Plachimada struggle lies in
the fact that it has highlighted the role that
local communities can have in protecting
groundwater resources. In January 2004, the
agitating villagers received a boost when global
activists converged on Plachimada for a three-day
World Water Conference and joined in
demonstrations in front of the main gate of the
Coca-Cola plant, one of the largest in its chain
of 27 plants in India.
Jose Bove, who
leads Confederation Paysanne (a left-leaning union
of peasants and farmers in France), declared that
the struggle at Plachimada was "part of the
worldwide struggle against transnational companies
that exploit natural resources like water". Bove
was joined by Maude Barlow, the Ottawa-based
author of Blue Gold, a book on corporate
theft of water resources, in pledging to turn
Plachimada into another Cochabamba - the city in
Bolivia where people thwarted plans to turn the
water supply system over to US transnational
Bechtel five years ago.
The question of
toxic materials in the sludge distributed to
farmers by the Coca-Cola factory as fertilizer was
also highlighted, among others, by Inger
Schorling, a delegate from Sweden and a green
member of the European Parliament. A "Plachimada
Declaration" adopted at the end of the conference
asserted that people everywhere should "resist all
criminal attempts to market, privatize and
corporatize water".
(Inter Press Service) |
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