by Mark Thomas
As the man employed by ‘City Hall’ to monitor Coca-Cola’s waste results Daniel saw the lab results. So did he see anything unusual? What was coming out of the waste pipes at the Coke plant? According to Daniel the company’s results said what was coming out of the pipe was ‘almost drinkable…It was pretty amazing, unbelievable, the wastewater was so clean…it was pure clean drinking water.’
‘But,’ I ask, ‘couldn’t that be the case? Might it be that the wastewater is drinkable?’
‘Look at the colour of the water,’ Daniel jumps in, ‘look at how people are feeling, look at the discussion about the dead fishes, how can that be clean water?’
Daniel doesn’t know how the results came to show this level of water purity but what he does know is that the results on paper do not match the results in the stream. He looks resigned and matter of fact when he says, ‘Remember, El Salvador doesn’t have the laws that exist in Europe and the US and developed countries. As a matter of fact we don’t even have a law regarding wastewater. It is a guideline still…I live in a country that doesn’t have the policies to protect the environment and that means big companies can do whatever they want.’
With no resolution in sight it was at this stage that the council took the extraordinary move of taking the company to court over the non-payment of the council taxes. Daniel furrows his forehead and raises his eyebrows, ‘To get the taxes they had to go to the Supreme Court to make them pay.’ He shakes his head slightly almost in disbelief and smiles, ‘I don’t know how City Hall won that case, but they did, they actually made them pay.’
Back in the mayor’s office, sitting with another cup of coffee, Rene the Mayor reveals how the company fared on its last condition to pay its council taxes. ‘They also broke their promise to pay their taxes to the municipality.’
‘What were the taxes for?’
‘Rubbish collection, for electricity and other things’ says Rene.
‘Would the taxes include water rates as well?’
‘No, the water, they are not paying anything for the water and they should.’
So the council took the Coca-Cola bottlers to court to get their taxes, and the council won.
I ask Rene the mayor and erstwhile revolutionary how he feels to have won in court against such a large company. ‘Happy,’ he says. Though he isn’t displaying a huge amount of that particular emotion at the moment. ‘To win against a company of this nature is not easy. They were thinking logically, “well we owe them two hundred thousand dollars, we’ll pay one hundred thousand to a good team of lawyers and we’ll save half the money and we’ll win”. They were wrong.’ He shrugs the shrug of a stoic.
‘After two years we won. They paid us two hundred thousand dollars, and it was a shame that we had to go to court to get them to pay us an amount which is not much for them, but for us it is a lot of money.’
So The Coca-Cola Company’s assertion that they have a role to play in helping communities become sustainable is bogus in this case. The water was polluted. The poorest people in town now have to pay for their water. The football team got no support. No jobs came to the town, save the near-mythical part-time gardener. The company did not pay its taxes. Yes, the council won but as Rene says, ‘we had to go to court to get them to pay us something which by law…they should have paid.’ Which may be why he is so resolutely un-celebratory in this victory.
The ex-revolutionary mayor who welcomed Coca-Cola into town sighs, spreads his hands out and explains how it could have been. ‘If you go and live in an area the best thing you can do is get integrated with the local population, look after them, so the place where you live is the best. But they have not done anything…they go to a place, they exploit all the resources and when there aren’t any they leave, and they leave the people in the place with the problem.’
Before the Dispatches programme was broadcast in November 2007, I put these allegations to Coke. They said they had a certificate to show they met international enviromental standards.7 They are also keen to promote their water stewardship efforts in Nejapa - which runs to providing two schools with clean water.8 Which I wouldn’t really want to criticise save for the fact that it doesn’t really address the concerns raised. But maybe I’m just picky…
Returning to the capital from the stream at Nejapa the evening track turns to road and the road spreads out from one lane to many. The emerald trees and brilliant pink and peach of wild climbing flowers give way to roadside expanses of dust, inhabited by stalls offering pyramid piles of green coconuts. The open space of the country starts to brim with city clutter. Makeshift bars, handcarts and barrows vie for custom selling sweets and drinks, while people crowd around buses with prayers painted on the doors. The massed throng is as transitory as the dusk that surrounds them. Pick-ups swirl with farm workers who climb on board the back of the truck, and grab hold of anything vaguely stable before speeding off. Barking clouds of black diesel fumes disappear as quickly as they came and the familiar smell of wood smoke haunts the air, promising the dream of home and the distance yet to travel.
As the lanes turn to highways so the twilight turns to night and we glide into San Salvador, where the central strip casts off the mantle of a Central American country, throws its identity to the wind and revels in a downmarket version of LA. Blacked-out windows on Land Cruisers, blasting music, rev at the lights. New model cars compete with each other as to who can cram the most smoking teenagers on the back seat. Here the night sky is torn with a bright glare as every conceivable fast-food outlet proclaims its wares in retina-shrinking light. The mighty yellow buns of Burger King compete with McDonalds’ golden arches and the glow fight spills over into the forecourts of Subway and Wendy’s. A cartoon chicken waves a friendly cowboy hat from an illuminated plastic shop front - Pollo Campero - ‘Howdy partner,’ it seems to say, ‘I’m cheap, tasty and happy as hell to be eaten!’ But KFC outshines them all, it’s a two-storey building in the shape of a KFC bucket. Neon strip lights run along the edges of the structure: a bucket glowing in the night. That is what identifies this restaurant, not the food but the receptacle it is served in, a bucket. Didn’t anyone at the planning stage of this venture say, ‘Isn’t using an image of something you can throw up in, a bad idea for the food industry?’
‘People here love fast food’ says Armando in a resigned voice too old for his twenty-four years. ‘Pollo Campero that’s the favourite, but everyone likes fast food.’
‘Is that because so many Salvadoreans fled to America in the civil war that people are really comfortable with US-style junk food?’ I ask
‘Some people are getting some dollars in their pockets, maybe they spend them here?’ ventures Eduardo our minder.
‘This, my friends,’ I say, declaiming with indignation, ‘…this is the sharp end of globalisation. This is the future of everywhere.’ I slump and sigh in the seat.
‘Maybe,’ says David the American, ‘maybe they jus’ like the taste, dude. Ever fuckin’ thought about that?’
INTERLUDE: CONNECTING
I feel that Customs Officers do not need to know the ins and outs of my life. A brief who are you, do you match to photo in the passport, when are you leaving and then a quick check in the bags for Semtex, smack or bush meat: job done. So I am not at my most forthcoming turning up at US Customs when I arrive to get a connecting flight from El Salvador. I step up from the line to see the officer has all the visual requirements he needs for the job, a crew cut and no visible contours twixt head and neck.
‘OK, sir,’ he grunts, scanning the passport with some kind of blip gun. ‘What was the purpose of your trip?’
‘In El Salvador?’
‘Yes sir, in El Salvador.’
‘I was filming, working on a film.’
‘You’re an actor?’
‘Of sorts’
‘What kind of film was it?’
Not wanting to say I’m making a programme about child labour, pollution and one of your country’s most esteemed compani
es, I say, ‘A drama documentary.’
Without missing a beat he replies, ‘What’s that, sir? A feature film?’
‘Well, sort of, it’s live-action drama in real-life situations,’ I say attempting not to stray somewhere close to the truth.
‘What is the name of the film?’
‘Fizz.’ I say, which is genuinely the working title of the documentary.
‘Fizz.’
‘Yes, Fizz.’
He lowers the passport, cocks his head conspiratorially towards me and in hushed tones says, ‘You’re not a porn star are you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Are you a porn star?’
‘No, no. I am not a porn star.’
He smiles and looks at me and says in a slow drawl, ‘I think you are.’
‘Well, no, erm, I’m flattered that you think I could be but I am not.’
He raises his eyebrows and in a monotone says, ‘Of course not, sir.’ Smiles, then snaps to officious mode, ‘Thank you very much, sir.’
I head off thinking that if I can be mistaken for a porn star, then Coca-Cola is not the only industry that needs to review its standards.
INDIA: A PREQUEL
‘The Coca-Cola Company exists to benefit and refresh everyone it touches.’
Coca-Cola Statement to BBC Radio 4’s Face the Facts, 2003
In the Seventies, while the rest of the world was being taught to sing in perfect harmony, to grow apple trees and honey bees, the Indian government was busy with a new piece of legislation, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act. The Act required foreign companies to ensure 60 per cent of their shares belonged to Indians in order to ‘Indianize’ these companies. In 1977, the Indian Government gave Coke two options - sell 60 per cent of your stake or leave. Coke decided to go. It wasn’t quite the corporate equivalent of fleeing in helicopters from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon but American symbols were poignantly departing from the east. It would be sixteen years before the company could persuade the authorities to let them back in.
In 1993 after several failed attempts, Coca-Cola returned. Its triumphant re-entry should have marked a new chapter in its troubled relationship with the country but Coke was dogged by controversy almost from the beginning and remains so to this day. In the first decade back in India, Coke had three substantial complaints laid at its door:
‘Where have the shares gone?’
Coke’s re-entry into India through a wholly owned subsidiary, Hindustan Coca-Cola Holdings (HCCH) was under certain conditions, one of which was that HCCH would sell 49 per cent of its shares to resident Indians and was given the not insubstantial timeframe of June 2002 to do so. Did Coca-Cola agree to this mandatory requirement? Clearly. Did Coca-Cola comply with this mandatory requirement? Do bears use bidets? No. In fact, according to Indian news reports at the time, they co-opted the US Commerce Department and the US Ambassador to apply pressure on the Indian authorities.1 Something clearly worked, because the Indian government agreed to let Coke sell the 49 per cent to private investors and business partners with a small percentage sold to employees’ trusts.2 But most crucially, and rather uniquely, these ‘Indian’ shares came with no voting rights because the company argued that would be ‘substantive and onerous’.3 So not only did they sell their shares to ‘friendly’ investors, what they sold was more of an accumulating gift voucher than a share as we might know it.
‘Where’s the water gone?’ Coca-Cola has shut down two bottling plants in India
In 1998, Coca-Cola bought 35 acres of land around Plachimada, a village in Kerala, Southern India and started building what was to become the most controversial plant in Coke’s Indian history. On 22 April 2002, villagers, concerned about the serious drop in water levels and the quality of water in their wells picketed the factory establishing a permanent protest camp.4 In 2003, the local Panchayat refused to renew Coke’s license to operate, citing ‘public interest’.5 And so the David and Goliath battle, as it became characterised, between this small, rural community and the most well-known company in the world was on.
The problem was the very essence of Coke’s business - water extraction. Its plant was extracting water from the underground aquifer at the rate of half a million litres a day according to the only official figures there are.6 Water levels in the area dropped dramatically though Coca-Cola argued that ‘the rainfall has been well below average for several years’7 and therefore the water depletion was not their fault. And although rainfall was indeed below average for several years, it is well known that Plachimada is in a ‘rain-shadow’ area of Kerala which means that its rainfall is always below average, somewhat limiting the ability of water extracted to be recharged naturally.8 Not necessarily the best place to locate a water-intensive plant, although the generous subsidies Coke received ‘for having invested in a backward area’9 may have helped in that decision.
When I visited the protest camp in 2004 it was a low shelter made of wood and straw and decorated with banners demanding that Coca-Cola leave. Most of the people protesting that day were women, as having to get the water, they were the ones most affected. And a drive through the surrounding villages echoed this point. In each village by the side of the road a line of pots would appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty of them bulbous plastic pots for collecting water. The lead pot sat under the village standpipe and the women sat opposite, waiting for the water to be turned on for an hour or so. Coke’s response to the villagers’ concerns was to challenge the Panchayat’s legitimacy. The leader of the Panchayat, Mr Krishnan, explained to me that the company argued the local Panchayat had the right to issue a licence but did not have the right to refuse to renew it. They effectively took the villagers as well as the protestors to court. They also asked for police protection…
As the legal battles raged on, the water levels continued to drop, so much so that Coke was forced to bus in tankers of water for the surrounding villages. In 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast their investigations into the plant on Face the Facts10 and Plachimada became a cause célèbre both nationally and internationally. The programme makers tested both the water in the village well and the sludge from the factory that Coke gave away free to farmers to use as fertiliser. The water unsurprisingly was found to be unsafe to drink but the real controversy was in the sludge. It contained ‘dangerous levels of toxic metals and the known carcinogen, cadmium’.11 Britain’s leading poisons expert, Professor John Henry said:
‘The [test] results have devastating consequences for those living near the areas where this waste has been dumped and for the thousands who depend on crops produced in these fields.
‘Cadmium is a carcinogen and it accumulates in the kidneys. Repeated exposure can lead to kidney failure. Lead is particularly dangerous to children and the results of exposure can be fatal. Even at low levels it can cause mental retardation and severe anaemia. What most worries me about the levels found is how this might be affecting pregnant women.’12
Sunil Gupta, Coca-Cola India’s vice-president said, ‘It’s good for the farmers because most of them are poor…We have scientific evidence to prove it is absolutely safe and we have never had any complaints.’13
The complaints did come and the company was forced to treat its sludge as exactly what it was - hazardous waste. By March 2004, the company, were forced to stop production, later blaming the continued legal wrangling on ‘certain misinformed campaigns’.14
As to the future, there are serious concerns over Plachimada’s water level and it remains to be seen if the aquifer will recover. In 2005, a Indian lab report on water from a well in the village found that it was so acidic that if consumed, ‘it would burn up your insides. Clothes could tear in such water, food will rot, crops will wither’.15
Coca-Cola’s future, however, is altogether more promising - it has offered to relocate to another site, provided the company is adequately compensated. In 2005, it wrote to the Ministry of Industry regarding its offer, saying (I have provided a running translation from the
corporate to plain English in the text): ‘relocating to the new site would also incur substantial expenditure by us, [it’ll cost us to move] we request to be provided appropriate compensation in the form of continued and increased sales tax incentives to offset the expense [so a few subsidies wouldn’t go amiss]…We would like to request that the relocation to the proposed site would entail a confirmed resolution for meeting the infrastructure needs of the company such as water and electricity along with an amicable environment devoid of the problems as have been faced in
Plachimada [keep the protestors the fuck away from us in future]. Further, the Company may be allowed to continue with its sales tax incentives and other applicable beneficial schemes for the remaining period [we’re passing round the bowl please give generously].’16
And Plachimada is not the only plant that has been shut down following protests. Villagers in Ballia in Uttar Pradesh launched a campaign against the plant alleging affected water levels and misappropriated community land, as well as calling on the Central Pollution Control Board to investigate chemical waste dumped on agricultural land. According to Coca-Cola, the ‘Ballia plant was a co-packing facility owned by a franchise bottler. As part of business restructuring and consolidation, the production at Ballia was discontinued from 26 June 2007.’17