Seven Oaks Magazine.

Across university campuses in North America there is a growing protest against Coca Cola for its abuse of human rights and its terrible record of environmental damage.

Several university campuses in the United States and United Kingdom have suspended contracts with Coca Cola on ethical grounds. Earlier this month the Department of Geography and Sociology at the university of Strathclyde in Glasgow banned Coke. In Canada, the University of Guelph Students’ Union has successfully campaigned to terminate the university’s exclusive contract with Coke. Students at McMaster University will vote on Oct 19-20 to end the exclusive contract with the company that the university signed in 1997. The protest against Coke is also coming to Vancouver.

Although Coca Cola’s abuses are spread across the world, its crimes in Colombia are the best known in North America. Since 1996, when it engineered the murder of trade union leader Isidoro Sejunco Gil by paramilitary forces at the bottling plant where he worked, Coke has been held responsible for the murder of 8 union leaders and 179 human rights violations. Coke has been accused of employing the paramilitary forces to intimidate and torture unionists in order to keep their bottling plants free of union activity.

The International Labour Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers, both in the US, have filed a lawsuit against Coke for these crimes. SinalTrainal, the union of Colombian workers attacked by Coke, has also brought a case for human rights violations against Coke in the US: they were allowed to proceed by the US district court in 2003. The Canadian Labour Congress has supported this litigation.

Coca Cola’s practices and their effects in India are less known here, but they are even more widespread in their damage. Coca Cola’s bottling plants draw vast quantities of water from the ground in India, leaving people around these plants little water for drinking or agriculture. They also bring up sludge contaminated with toxic metals like cadmium and lead, which pollutes the land and water around the plants. Coke has also distributed the sludge to farmers to fertilize their crops, leading to crop failure and contamination.

Coca Cola’s operations in India produce profit for the company and its Indian partners and provide bottled drinks for the urban middle class at the expense of farmers and the poor, especially in areas of water scarcity. Many farmers have lost their livelihood and many women have to walk long distances in search of drinkable water because Coca Cola draws as much as 500,000 liters of water a day for their plant at Plachimada in Kerala. In Kudus village in Maharashtra, the water has dried up because of Coca Cola bottling operations. Over 50 villages in Rajasthan near the bottling facility at Kala Dera are suffering from water shortage. In Mehdiganj, near Varanasi, the bottling plant has caused the groundwater to recede from 25 to 40 feet.

The people affected by these activities, many of whom are adivasis and dalits, have been protesting for the last few years. Often the protesters have been severely beaten up by armed police and arrested. When more than a thousand farmers and community activists marched near the plant in Mehdiganj in November 2004 to protest water shortage and contamination, many were beaten and 350 were arrested.

But the struggle against Coke is growing and recently there have been victories. The plant in Plachimada has been shut for 18 months, since March 2004, because the panchayyat refused to renew Coca Cola’s license to draw 500,000 liters of water a day. Although the Kerala High Court ruled on September 7 to allow Coca Cola to withdraw the water, Kerala's Government has taken the matter to the Supreme Court of India. In the meantime the elections to the panchayyat have led to the overwhelming majority of the group that opposed the Coca Cola license, showing the widespread popular support for the opposition. In Tamil Nadu, in the villages of Sivaganga and Gangarikondan, where bottling plants were being planned, the residents, led by women and dalits, have been protesting the plans since April because they wouldn’t leave enough water for drinking and agriculture. Again, recent panchayyat elections have shown the popular support for these struggles.

Apart from these direct and indirect effects on people’s lives from the bottling of Coca Cola and its non-fizzy siblings such as Dasani, protesters against the company are also concerned with the wider ramifications of giving a natural resource like water to which we all have a right as human beings to a corporation for marketing at a profit.