Coca cola, a U.S based multi-national company and a political product of it's domination and global sucess, has it's straws down in Indian wells siphoning away much needed water.Recent news read that so much water was being pulled out for the manufacture of the drink that the sites with bottling plants, and the villages around,from uttar pradesh to kerala, are left with little water to drink, cook and wash.The condition is even worse in Mexico where coke has accounted for land privatisation program that allowed free access to all the resources on the land, including water.And it seems it needs four litres of water to produce one litre of tasty-tasty coke.Need of the day!
Coke does not directly employ child labor.Not violating the law, and by it's own guiding principles coke only buys sugarcane from the fields of El Salvador which employs around 5000 to 30,000 children,some as young as 8 years.Sugarcane farming, from what I know, is one of the most hazardous of practices.One is bound to sustain several injuries and health hazards, inspite of experience.Imagine what plight little children will have to undergo. Some children also get to miss school during the harvesting period.
At colombia, the killings of union leaders at Coca-Cola's bottling plants has evoked truths about the company taking paramilitaies' help to threaten and harass its union leaders.Columbia is a country already famous for its paramilitaries belonging to its self defense forces itself who treat trade union leaders like pests taking their lives in dozens every year. Claims show that the company benefits from paramilitary violence and is also one of the orchestrating powers of right-wing paramilitaries.
Big Cola is a famous mexican cola company, now under rapid supression from coke.Market positions in Mexico are taken by power and the retailers are put under immense pressure not to sell rival drink Big Cola. Coke also has found a brilliant niche market in there that is made to believe cola induces burping, which releases the evil from the soul!
Denials and evasions are all that comes from the company's side of the story.Coca cola is just the parent corporation that markets the drink.So,technically coke is not produced by a single global company, but a global network of bottling companies that are either wholly or partially owned by Coca cola.That gives coke reason enough to elude the enlisted abuses and keep up the high-value brand name.
For some reason ,I feel,coke gets picked up first against its more conservative cousins.May be its the extensive ad campaigns, costly brand ambassadors, or simply for the cool dude/dudette image it creates.Whatever it is,coke may well be your favourite soft- drink but for many ruralites clean water is still their drink of choice.You can spare them some by refusing a bottle of the not-so-healthy fizzy pop!
