A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

  The company responded by announcing that it would license an Israeli bottling franchise in Tel Aviv. This, in turn, provoked the Arab League to call on its members to boycott Coca-Cola. The company refused to back down, and the Arab boycott came into force in August 1968. The company's decision was entirely pragmatic: It gave up the Arab market in order to avoid a domestic boycott by the Jewish community, which would have cost it far more. The result was that Coca-Cola once again found itself aligned with and identified with American foreign policy. Pepsi, meanwhile, took advantage of the opportunity to move into Arab markets while staying out of Israel, even though this cost it some customers in the United States, who considered its actions anti-Semitic.

  Not until the late 1980s, when the Arab boycott of CocaCola finally crumbled, did Coca-Cola begin making inroads into Arab markets, notably in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. But the real prize was Saudi Arabia, which had become Pepsi's third-largest foreign market after Canada and Mexico. During the Gulf War of 1991, Coca-Cola sent in refrigerated trucks to supply American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, but could not compete with Pepsi, which had five factories in the country. Television viewers around the world saw General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander of the coalition that had evicted Iraqi forces from Kuwait, signing the cease-fire with a can of Pepsi by his side. Coca-Cola responded with a big push into the Saudi market, in order to put Pepsi on the defensive and weaken its ability to compete in other markets.

  By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, the idea of expressing anti-Americanism through attacks on its soft drinks had taken several new forms. Muslim youths in Thailand poured CocaCola onto the ground in protest at the American-led invasion, and sales were suspended amid growing anti-American protests. Meanwhile, locally made colas started to become popular in the Middle East. Zam Zam Cola, an "Islamic" cola made in Iran by a company that used to be Pepsi's partner in the country, became popular in Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, where it sold four million cans in its first week on sale. Star Cola, made in the West Bank, became popular in the United Arab Emirates. The equation of Coca-Cola with the United States persisted for both critics and supporters. When American troops occupied Saddam Hussein's palace in Baghdad in April 2003, they held a barbecue at which they consumed hamburgers, hot dogs, and, inevitably, Coca-Cola.

  Globalization by the Bottle

  As well as being associated with America, Coca-Cola also encapsulates the trend toward a single global marketplace: in a word, globalization. Believers in globalization argue that abolishing trade barriers, tariffs, and other obstacles to free and unfettered international commerce is the best way to improve the fortunes of rich and poor countries alike. By setting up factories in the developing world, for example, companies from rich countries can reduce their costs, while also creating jobs and boosting the economy in the poorer countries where they set up shop. Opponents of globalization complain that such practices are exploitative, since they create low-wage, low-status jobs; multinational companies are also able to exploit looser labor and environmental regulations by shifting jobs overseas. The debate rages on. But an oft-heard complaint, as companies spread their tentacles around the world and compete on a global playing field, is that globalization is merely a new form of imperialism. Antiglobaliza-tion activists argue that the world's only superpower, the United States, is intent on invading the rest of world not with soldiers and bombs but with its culture, companies, and brands, chief among them Microsoft, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola.

  Certainly no single product is more representative of globalization than Coca-Cola. The global fight with Pepsi continues around the world; the big new battleground is China. But that is just one of the more than two hundred territories where the Coca-Cola Company operates—more than the United Nations has members. Its drink is now the world's most widely known product, and "Coca-Cola" is said to be the second most commonly understood phrase in the world, after "OK." No other company can match it for global reach, visibility, or recognition. Coca-Cola consistently tops the list of the world's most valuable brands, published each year in BusinessWeek magazine.

  Yet even the most powerful brand in the world cannot brainwash people into buying something they do not want, despite antiglobalists' claims to the contrary. New Coke, a sweeter, more Pepsi-like drink that was introduced by the Coca-Cola Company in 1985, was a disaster. Consumers shunned the new drink, and sales plummeted, forcing the company to reintroduce the original drink as Coca-Cola Classic within weeks and sealing the fate of its attempt to meddle with an American icon.

  Coca-Cola also shows how strong global brands can work in consumers' interests, not against them. Around the world, the Coca-Cola name and logo are the company's guarantee of consistent quality. With a brand worth an estimated seventy billion dollars, the company has a huge incentive to maintain its reputation and the quality of its products, or risk losing its customers. The desire to protect its global brand makes the Coca-Cola Company, like other large companies, extremely wary of bad publicity and far more accountable than it would otherwise be. Firms with national brands do not have to worry what people in other countries think about them, but firms with global brands do.

  An analysis by The Economist magazine in 1997 found that consumption of Coca-Cola in different countries—a good proxy for those countries' degree of globalization—correlated closely with greater wealth, quality of life (measured using a scale devised by the United Nations), and social and political freedom. "Fizzy mass-market stuff—ie, capitalism—is good for you," the magazine concluded. It is not Coca-Cola that makes people wealthier, happier, or freer, of course, but as consumerism and democracy spread, the fizzy brown drink is never far behind.

  Today, carbonated soft drinks are the most widely consumed beverages in the United States, accounting for around 30 percent of all liquid consumption, and the Coca-Cola Company is the biggest single supplier of such drinks. Globally, the company supplies 3 percent of humanity's total liquid intake. Coca-Cola is unquestionably the drink of the twentieth century, and all that goes with it: the rise of the United States, the triumph of capitalism over communism, and the advance of globalization. Whether you approve of that mixture or not, you cannot deny the breadth of its appeal.

  Epilogue

  Back to the Source

  Water is a limited natural resource and a public good fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a healthy life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.

  —United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights, 2002

  Six BEVERAGES HAVE defined humankind's past, but which will embody its future? One drink has already emerged as the most likely candidate. Like many of the defining drinks of history, it is highly fashionable, is the subject of conflicting medical claims, and has unseen but far-reaching geopolitical significance. Its availability will determine the path of humankind's future, on Earth and potentially beyond. Ironically, it is also the drink that first steered the course of human development: water. The history of drinking has come right back to its source.

  On the face of it, this might appear to be a welcome occurrence. Much of the appeal of other beverages, starting with beer in the Neolithic period, was that they were less likely than water to be contaminated. Only when the microbiological basis of water contamination began to be unraveled in the nineteenth century did it become feasible to tackle a problem that had bedeviled humans for centuries: maintaining an adequate supply of freshwater. Where previous generations turned to other drinks as substitutes, it is now possible to address the problem of contamination directly, through water purification and other improvements in sanitation. Water's growing popularity, in other words, suggests that the danger of contamination is finally receding. But the reality is rather more complicated. Indeed, nowhere is the gulf between the developed and developing worlds more apparent than in their attitudes toward water.

  Sales of bottled water a
re booming, with the highest levels of consumption in the developed world, where tap water is abundant and safe to drink. Italians are the world's most enthusiastic consumers of bottled water, drinking an average of 180 liters per year each; they are closely followed by the French, Belgians, Germans, and Spanish. The global bottled-water industry had revenues of around forty-six billion dollars in 2003, and consumption of bottled water is growing by 11 percent a year, faster than for any other drink. Restaurants serve expensive water in designer bottles, and the habit of carrying a small plastic bottle of drinking water at all times, pioneered by supermod­els, has become widespread. Stop at a filling station in the United States, and you will find that bottled water, ounce for ounce, costs more than gasoline. Mineral waters from specific sources, from France to Fiji, are shipped to consumers around the world.

  The popularity of bottled water stems from the widespread belief that it is healthier and safer than tap water. But tap water, in developed nations at least, is just as safe. While there are occasional contamination scares, they affect bottled water too. In one study, published in the Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, Ohio, and found that a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be mis­guided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva came to the same conclusion, as did a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

  That is hardly surprising, since as much as 40 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States is, in fact, derived from tap water, though it is usually filtered and may have extra minerals added. America's two leading bottled-water brands, Aquafina and Dasani, are derived from municipal water supplies. And although many bottled-water labels depict glaciers, crystal streams, and ice-covered mountains, these images do not always reflect the true origins of the water within. A study by the National Resources Defense Council, an American environmental lobby group, found that one brand of bottled water, labeled as "pure glacier water," came from a municipal water supply. Another brand, claiming to be "spring water," with a label showing a lake and mountains, actually came from a well in a factory parking lot, near a hazardous waste dump. The study also noted that in both Europe and the United States, the quality of tap water is far more stringently controlled than the quality of bottled water.

  There is no evidence that bottled water is any safer or healthier than the tap water available in developed nations, and in blind tasting tests, most people cannot tell the difference between the two. The differences in taste between bottled waters exceed the difference in taste between bottled water and tap water. Yet people continue to buy bottled water, even though it costs between 250 and 10,000 times as much per gallon as tap water. In short, safe water has become so abundant in the developed world that people can afford to shun the tap water under their noses and drink bottled water instead. Since both kinds are safe, the sort of water one drinks has become a lifestyle choice.

  In contrast, for many people in the developing world, access to water remains a matter of life or death. A fifth of the world's population, or around 1.2 billion people, currently lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to waterborne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, such as diarrhea, hookworm, or trachoma. There are about four billion cases of diarrhea a year, resulting in 1.8 million deaths, 90 percent of them among children under five. Illness and death are not the only consequences of the lack of access to water; it also hinders education and economic development. Widespread illness makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home.

  The United Nations has set a goal of reducing by half the proportion of people without access to freshwater and adequate sanitation by 2015. But although good progress was made during the 1980s and 1990s, the rate at which people are being connected to safe water supplies has since declined. One problem is that while access to water is still improving in rural areas, its availability in cities has declined in many parts of the developing world. This decline is worrisome, given the unstoppable trend toward urbanization. By around 2007, demographers estimate, more than half of the world's population will for the first time be living in cities; humankind will have completed the six-thousand-year transition from being a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban species. According to figures from the International Water Management Institute, it would cost an extra $1.7 billion a year beyond what is already being spent to achieve the United Nations' desired improvement in access to water, while improving sanitation would cost a further $9 billion or so a year—a small fraction of the amount spent on bottled water in rich nations. But there is more to solving the problem of access to water than money. In many cases there are political obstacles too. In recent years disputes over water rights, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, have caused political tension and even military conflict.

  Water was, for example, an important unseen factor behind the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza. Ariel Sharon, who was a general at the time and later became Israel's prime minister, noted in his autobiography that although people usually regard June 5, 1967, as the start of the Six Day War, "in reality, it started two and a half years earlier, on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan." In 1964 Syria had started building a canal to divert two of the main tributaries of the Jordan River away from Israel. Using a combination of artillery and air strikes, Israel brought work on the canal to a halt. "While the border disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death," wrote Sharon. Israel values the territories it occupied in 1967, which granted it control of the Jordan's headwaters, as much for their water supply as for any military advantage. The Palestinians who live in the West Bank are allotted just 18 percent of the territory's water; the rest goes to Israel.

  Ever since, politicians in the Middle East have cited water as a possible cause of future conflict in the region. In 1978 Egypt threatened military action against Ethiopia if it interfered with the flow of the Nile, Egypt's chief water supply. When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, its president, Anwar Sadat, declared that "the only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water." And in 1985 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the Egyptian foreign minister and later the secretary-general of the United Nations, predicted that "the next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics."

  It is hardly surprising that water should be such a contentious topic; rivers and lakes mark international boundaries, and at least ten rivers flow across half a dozen or more borders, so that one country's actions affect other countries downstream. Ethiopia controls 85 percent of the waters of the Nile, upstream of Egypt; Turkey's dam on the Euphrates lets it control the flow into Syria. Flooding has prompted Bangladesh to demand that India and Nepal build dams upstream to control the flow of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.

  In the arid region of central Asia, there are fears that growing water scarcity might spark conflict between the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Another concern is that: climate change will alter the distribution of water, leading to flooding in some areas and droughts in others, affecting agricultural production, and causing political instability. Many observers have, therefore, suggested that water might replace oil as the scarce commodity m
ost likely to trigger international conflict.

  Yet water can also promote international cooperation. Access to water is so fundamental that its management has often forced otherwise hostile states to work together. The Indus Basin Treaty of 1960, which dictates how India and Pakistan should share the water of the Indus and its tributaries, has remained in force despite repeated military clashes between the two nations. Similarly, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam have cooperated over the management of the Mekong, even though the region through which it flows has been racked by war. And in the late 1990s the ten squabbling countries of the Nile Basin signed a cooperative water-management agreement backed by the United Nations and the World Bank. Water, it seems, has the potential to be both a cause of war and a catalyst for peace.

  In the longer term, and assuming that humanity manages to avoid nuclear self-immolation, the establishment of colonies on other worlds, starting with Mars, will also depend on the avail ability of adequate water. The inhabitants of a Mars colony will need water to drink and wash, to grow crops, and to convert into rocket fuel, which can be made by splitting water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen. This, together with the search for extraterrestrial life (which is also assumed to depend on water), explains why so much effort is being put into locating and understanding the distribution of water on other bodies in the solar system. Some scientists even believe that colonizing Mars is necessary to ensure the continued survival of humanity. Only by becoming a "multiplanetary species," they argue, can we truly guard against the possibility of being wiped out by war, disease, or a mass extinction caused by an asteroid or comet crashing into the Earth. But that will depend on finding supplies of water on other worlds.