Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  ‘Where’s the pesticides...?’ …in the bottles of Coke and Pepsi

  In 2003, the Centre for Science and Environment, an independent Indian public-interest organisation conducted a series of tests, firstly on bottled water and then on soft drinks. The Centre was concerned about the lack of regulations in the food industry and hoped its research would start a debate that would eventually lead to India adopting standards for water quality. On 5 August 2003 it published the results into its soft drinks study18 and indeed sparked a debate - although not only in India but worldwide. For the CSE had found levels of pesticides in bottles of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to be between 30-36 times higher than would be permitted in the EU.19

  It is fair to say that all hell broke loose and nothing in the world could have prepared CSE for the backlash. Within hours of the report being published Coca-Cola and Pepsico held a joint press conference to denounce the findings and question the methodology - which is a bit like Iran and Iraq uniting to say ‘the Isle of Wight is picking on us’ . Pepsico immediately slapped a writ on CSE which it later withdrew.20 And a Joint Parliamentary Committee (the equivalent to a Public Enquiry conducted by Parliament) was convened - only the fifth in India’s history. Not to consider pesticides in India’s food chain but to see if CSE’s findings are correct. Talk about shoot the messenger. In the eye of the storm, life was pretty hard for the CSE - although they expected a fight, they ‘had not anticipated…the sheer power and the virulence of the attack’.21 India’s secret service even paid them a visit - just to let them know that anyone who had ever worked for the organisation was being investigated.22 Their methodology and motives was all questioned, their reputation savaged but the CSE held their ground and in February 2004, the JPC upheld their findings.23 They concluded, ‘the Committee…find that the CSE findings are correct on the presence of pesticide residues…The Committee also appreciate the whistle blowing act of CSE in regard to alerting the nation to an issue with major implications to food safety…and human…health…The Committee note with deep concern that the soft drink…industry with an annual turnover of Rs 6,000 crores24 is unregulated.’25

  But despite this and their recommendations, little changed. So in August 2006 CSE conducted the tests again, this time using even more up-to-date equipment. It found Coca-Cola and Pepsico products contained pesticides on average 24 times over the prescribed limit.26

  Coca-Cola’s response was to conduct its own tests. Oddly, the samples provided by Coke showed no signs of pesticides above EU standards.

  So not a great start to buinsess back in India.

  I was about to find out how Coke’s second decade was shaping up…

  9

  KURIJI

  Kaladera, India

  ‘If you want to know the truth about The Coca-Cola Company: Ask the farmer in India.’

  The Coca-Cola Company, 20071

  I do like it when companies write stuff like this. ‘Ask the farmer in India…’ they say, as if inviting all and sundry to drop whatever they are doing, travel to India, drive out to the farmer’s place and ask if he will vouch for Coke. Assuming you did mange to get to India with this in mind, you would then face an added hurdle as the company weren’t terribly specific about which farmer they meant. That’s if they actually did have someone in mind, and hunting representational composites is fiendishly difficult. But I am in India surrounded by farmers and seeing as The Coca-Cola Company did invite me to ask them, I did.

  The farmer I chose to ask is Mr Rameshwar Prasad Kuri who is sixty-four and comes from Kaladera in Rajasthan. It is common for Indians to use the suffix ‘ji’, adding it to a person’s name when addressing an elder and wishing to show respect. So Mr Kuri is called Kuriji. This particular linguistic custom was explained to me by an Indian student, who after imparting this knowledge asked, ‘What do you have in England like this?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What do you do to show respect for elders in England?’ he earnestly enquired.

  ‘We don’t put them in a home,’ I replied.

  The comment is meet with incomprehension.

  I met Kuriji in a village called Mehdiganj, the nearest city to which is Varanasi on the banks of the River Ganges, famous for its ghats and funeral pyres. The ghats are the long wide steps leading down to the river where pilgrims flock to absolve themselves of sin. So sacred is the Ganges for Hindus that here in Varanasi you can rent out rooms to die in, so your cremated ashes can be put straight into the river. A friend told me he once saw a tourist sign reading ‘Come to Varanasi: a great place to die.’

  It bustles with life, markets, crowds and the usual theatre of everyday Indian existence. Indeed, it is not a bad place to die, though my preference would be a violent heart attack in the British Library, just so the last thing I hear on the planet is SHHH!

  It is from here that I set out, leaving the city and heading into the countryside for the village. The quick and easy way to get there is by motorised three-wheeler, a kind of tuk-tuk, if you were in Thailand. And travelling for forty minutes in a motorised three-wheeler in India is about the most fun you can legally have outside of Alton Towers. It stops, starts, jumps, revs and swerves its way though a jaw-dropping and beautiful world.

  I love these forty minutes. The hot air rushes about you and the driver manhandles the steering like he is in a rodeo. Men scoot past on motorbikes with women riding sidesaddle on the back, clutching their saris demurely. Every village we drive through has a bike repair shop, a cow in the road and if you are early enough a bloke washing from a steel pan outside his home, wearing nothing but a wrapped tight lungi and a lot of soap suds. Temples and schools sit alongside peasant huts, where dung patties shaped like Cornish pasties sit drying in the sun. Top-heavy palm trees and pan wallah shacks sit next to roadside garages where trucks are serviced in the dust, stacked up on bricks while skinny engineers crouch under giant steel frames.

  As the three-wheeler twists sharply to avoid imminent oncoming-overtaking-tractor-death, I remember that in India there is a special competition played on the roads called Who Can Transport the Most Improbable Object in a Vehicle. Today’s contenders include a very old cyclist with legs like a plucked chicken wing. He carries two very large red Calor gas bottles, one balanced on each handle, and rides unconcernedly on the dual carriageway alongside speeding lorries. He is up against another cyclist doing a sharp left in traffic while carrying half a dozen 30-foot industrial steel rods balanced on his handlebars. It is as if the India’s Heath and Safety Executive is run by Wile E Coyote.

  As we drive past the hand-painted adverts which decorate walls, houses and shop fronts I marvel at the way the English language here is laced with the nuances of 1947, the time the British left. Back in Delhi buses have slogans on the side of them proclaiming ‘Propelled by hydrogen!’ What a wonderful word ‘propelled’! and how brilliant it is that bus loads of Indians can be propelled. And wouldn’t you look forward to your commute every morning if you were propelled? Saris are not sold in retail outlets or boutiques but in ‘Emporiums’. And out in the countryside adverts, painted on end walls, picture Y-fronts and T-shirts, with the slogan ‘Shirts, vest, panties, drawers.’ Oh, that we could advertise drawers and panties instead of briefs and thongs. But my favourite word is used to describe the activities of the farmers opposed to the Coca-Cola bottlers, they are not a ‘movement’ or a ‘campaign’ nor do they ‘lobby’- they take part in an ‘agitation’. And that is exactly what they have done, a small group of people has truly agitated Coca-Cola.

  The only thing that marks out Mehdiganj from so many other villages is the Coca-Cola bottling plant at one end of it. Apart from that it is an ordinary village that sits on the side of a dual carriageway and collects dust. Which it does very well. I turn down the road that runs between two teashops where the smoky wood fires lazily turn the air blue under the low eaves of the bungalow roofs. The chai wallahs serve up clay cups of scalding milky brew and small plates of home-made sweets. I stand for a
moment and see the road snake into the open countryside. Then walking past the open doors of family homes and a tiny shop with boxes of hair colouring pinned to the wall I come to a glade that spreads out to the side of village, on the edge of the fields. This is a natural meeting place, an opening ringed with trees and a low canopy that casts a dappled shade. This is the venue for National Right to Water Conference and Protest against Coca-Cola, to give it its full title.

  Over three days hundreds of farmers and villages from the various corners of India gather to share their experiences of what it is like to have Coca-Cola as a neighbour, as well as to organise how to close those plants that remain open. There are four Coca-Cola bottlers with local agitations running against them. Plachimada in Kerala in the South and Ballia to the East have been shut down. The other two are Kaladera to the West and here in the village of Mehdiganj itself. The glade is set to swell with hundreds of people from these places - villagers, farmers and a smattering of activists and press. Some women and children are literally carted in to attend, on bright red metal trailers hooked up to large clunking tractors with black funnels decorated with gold and pink tinsel garlands. The conference is quickly packed and long trumpet-shaped loudspeakers are hung in the trees, tied up with string and wires run through the branches, so everyone can hear speaker after speaker stand at a podium to decry the company. This is the place to ask a farmer about Coca-Cola.

  I spoke to a lot of them. I met Raj Narayan Patel, a fifty-five-year-old from Mehdiganj, a stocky man, with grey hair, black rings round his eyes and orange teeth that comes from chewing paan. He insisted I look at his well, a brick-lined circular pit level with the ground that descends to a puddle, some mud and a few stones. He pointed avidly at rings in the well, watermarks at various depths, to indicate the depletion. I asked him if he knew of a farmer who might be able to say a good word for the company. He gently led me to a seat in the shade and went off to fetch me a glass of water.

  I met Siyaram Yadav, a bearded farmer with five children who, along with his father, sat with us under an awning. While he talked of failed crops and water shortages we shared brown balls of unrefined sugar that he passed around. I called it ‘Bootleg sugar’. He too insisted I see his well, which looked like a wishing well that had been in a fight, and had a rudimentary cranked windlass to pull up the water, should any appear.

  I met Baliram Ram from Ballia, he was dressed in a matching purple shirt and slacks and had a milky, dead eye where a goat had kicked him as a child. He was straight out of a Tom Waits song. His well is 180 km away but if I wanted he would take me to it. I politely turned down the offer; there are only so many empty wells a man can see. So instead he told me that Indian farmers should be sent to Kashmir to settle the issue, as ‘Indian farmers will never give up one inch of land!’ Later I retold this to friend who was also at the conference. He said, ‘Mark, what you have to understand is that Indian farmers are not like British farmers.’

  ‘Do they copulate sober?’ I enquire.

  ‘Most people in this country live on the land,’ he continues, pointedly ignoring me, ‘For them the land is everything, it is their worth, their life, their dignity, everything.’

  Now I’ll confess straight away that I know little about farming. And by little I mean nothing. In Britain most city dwellers tend to love the British countryside but hate the people who live there, leaving a large gap in our knowledge of matters agricultural. Fortunately some of the farmers here were very happy to talk me through the subject and demonstrated as much, if not more, patience in explaining their work as I did in listening about it. And after all their discourse on agriculture it comes down to these two simple facts:• Farmers need water for crops and villagers need water to survive.

  • Coca-Cola’s main ingredient is water.

  The Coca-Cola Company own and control The Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverage Pvt. Ltd (HCCBPL), which in turn own and operate the Kaladera plant near where Kuriji lives. The plant started running in January 2000 not far from Kuriji’s farm and the fundamental problem with the plant is that, well, it’s been built in a drought zone. To suggest the community have problems with water is an understatement. Kaladera is in the district which has been in drought for 50 of the past 106 years - 47 per cent of the time.2 In 1998 the water in the area was deemed to be over-exploited by the Central Groundwater Board.3

  However, someone at Coke in India decided it would be a good idea to open a water-intensive industry in a drought prone area. For some reason the word that springs to mind is ‘D’oh!’

  KALADERA AND THE TERI REPORT

  I did ask Coca-Cola India if I could visit Kaladera. I also asked them for an interview. They didn’t seem very keen. In fact, what they actually said was, ‘[g]iven the history of biased reporting about our operations by Mark Thomas, most recently in the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 that contained outdated and inaccurate allegations, we have decided not to have any involvement in this latest Mark Thomas project’.4 I took that as a no. But we do know a little bit about how the plant is run from a report by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and it is worth explaining a little about this report. It was commissioned after the University of Michigan suspended its contracts with Coca-Cola in response to student concerns that the Company’s actions in Colombia and India violated the University’s ethical trading policy. Coke finally agreed to an ‘independent’ third party study and it chose TERI to conduct that investigation.5 Finally published in

  January 2008 the report, however, did give some interesting information about the operation of the plant in Kaladera, including the following facts:• The plant pays virtually nothing for the water it uses.

  • The plant has four bore wells sunk to a depth of 330 feet that can bring up at least 120,000 litres of water an hour.

  • There is a very small charge for the dumping wastewater: approximately Rs 0.2 per 1,000 litres (the equivalent of about £0.0024 per 1,000 litres).

  • The average amount of water extracted in May (peak production month) between 2004-2006 was just under a million litres of water a day, to be specific, 953,333 litres a day.

  • During the eight years that Coke has been operating, the water tables have gone down by more than a metre each year and about three metres in 2003/04.

  • On average it takes 3.8 litres of water to make 1 litre of pop.6

  Did I mention they pay virtually nothing for the water?

  The conference in the glade is in full swing. Speakers are in full cry, the crowd cheer appreciatively and if there are any gaps in the programme the local band jumps in to perform protest songs - ripping out the lyrical innards of popular ballads and replacing them with a more suitable polemic. So Kuriji and I look for a quieter place to sit and have a chat. We cross the road and smile at the barber who has set up shop under a telegraph pole, walk through the mango orchard and out on to the fields, coming to rest at the edge of a grove of trees.

  Even for a farmer Kuriji is a self-contained man. Balding and grey he is not a large person, either in height or weight, and he carries himself with the gentle gravitas of age. Two ballpoint pens are clipped into the top pocket of his shirt. His family have farmed in Kaladera going back to ‘my great-grandfather’s grandfather,’ he said. His wife and son ran the family farm when he worked as a civil servant for the state government of Rajasthan. As the assistant director of agriculture, his job was to find ways that farmers could practically apply the latest research into farming methods and would tour farms explaining and helping. On retiring in 2002 he took to working full-time on the farm and in turn agitating. Sitting, he produces a large notebook, this is his journal of Kaladera’s struggle for water, detailing each twist and turn in the saga, including each journalist he has ever spoken to on the subject. I suppose you can take a man from the civil service…

  Kuriji begins with Coca-Cola’s arrival, ‘As soon as it started, the water level went down drastically. This is the main problem. Second problem, earlier we used a three-horsep
ower motor. But immediately after Coke arrived we had to replace it with a five-horsepower motor.’

  ‘Is this because of Coke?’

  ‘Yes. The water level went down. We had to dig the wells deeper and to pump water from such depth, five-horsepower motor was needed.’

  He might well have the civil service knack of itemising the issues, but he has a farmer’s concerns. Having listed depleted well water and pumps, he comes to ‘Thirdly, earlier we could irrigate around fourteen-fifteen acres of land with the water available but now the water is sufficient for only ten-twelve acres of land. The fourth problem is that yield also reduced. Water is required for a good harvest…’

  It is only after working his way through pumps, yields and irrigation he comes to the fifth and last problem, at the bottom of the priority pile. ‘Fifth problem was that water for the hand pumps dried up. In some parts they have stopped working, have become dry. There is no water.’