People's Democracy(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) |
Vol.
XXVII
No. 33 August 17, 2003 |
Peddling
Poison
Coca
Cola and Pepsi Must Go!
Amit
Sen Gupta
THE year: 1970. In the South American country of Chile, Salvador Allende had just been elected as president but was yet to be confirmed and sworn in constitutionally. Allende had won in the face of the whole economic might of US corporations and the US government, who had funded the campaign of his
opponent.
Richard Nixon, then president of the United states received a personal call from
Donald Kendall, Chairman of Pepsi Co. This had not been
ASSASSINATION
OF ALLENDE
The CIA swung into action. The nature of its operation can be gauged from the “Eyes only, restricted handling, secret” message to US station chief of the CIA, Santiago. From CIA headquarters on October 16, 1970. The message said, “It is the firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a
coup... Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure...” The attempt in 1970 failed as the CIA found it difficult to sway the Chilean army. But they persisted, egged on by persistent prompting from US multinationals like PepsiCo, ITT (the forerunner of AT&T) and copper multinationals.
Finally
in 1973 they engineered the assassination of Allende.
American interests were protected once again and the Chilean people
tortured, more than 200,000 dismissed for political reasons, and more than 30,000 students expelled from the university by the military that took over.
Fast forward to the decade of the nineties. The US is now engaged in subverting the democratic process in another South American country - Colombia. And what better ally can they have than another soft drink giant -- Coca Cola. For almost a decade now Coca Cola has been working closely with the mafia and criminal gangs in the country to terrorise its workers.
Since 1996, eight workers and union activists from Coca-Cola plants in Colombia have been murdered by anti-union paramilitary groups. Managers of the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia have allowed, and encouraged,
right-wing
paramilitaries and government security forces to threaten, detain,
kidnap, and murder union activists.
Isidro
Segundo Gil was killed inside the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa
The
year: 2003. The scene shifts to the corridors of the World Health
At the heart of the controversy is the WHO’s report on obesity and nutrition. The report urges governments to clamp down on TV advertisements pushing “sugar-rich items” to impressionable thirsty youngsters and consider levying heavier taxes on them. It suggests that school vending machines should be turned into scrap metal. The WHO is concerned about the rising tide of obesity that is killing and debilitating millions in rich countries such as the UK and US and that is now edging into poor countries to co-exist obscenely with malnutrition. The soft drinks industry, appalled at this “interference” with its global dominance, disputes not only the scientific evidence but the WHO’s right even to raise issues of taxes and advertising.
Pepsi
and Coke received strong support for their stand from an expected
The above are but a few glimpses from the murky history of the soft drink giants, Pepsi and Coca Cola. Should we really be surprised when we learn from a study recently published by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) that they have been serving us soft drinks laced with deadly pesticides? Let us not forget that Coca Cola started as a firm that peddled drugs! Till 1906 it is officially acknowledged that their formula contained cocaine. The two, who today symbolize the “free world” and the “American way of life” have for a century carved out an empire by marketing junk that is bad for health - pesticides notwithstanding. They have even acquired a philanthropic sheen. They fund “social causes” and a member of Coca Cola’s board of directors sits on the board of the Ford Foundation, which appears to have, in recent years, built a reputation for funding “radical” causes!
From
drug peddling to philanthropy - it has been a long and eventful
The CSE study itself is a damning piece of evidence that suggests corporate irresponsibility and double standards. It found that all the different brands sold by these companies—Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi, Miranda orange, Miranda lemon, Blue Pepsi, 7-Up, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Limca, Sprite and Thums Up—contained the deadly insecticide lindane which damages the body’s central nervous system and has the potential to induce cancers.
Coca-Cola,
for example, was found to contain lindane in a concentration of
But
the reaction of the Indian government to the report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on pesticide content in Coke and Pepsi
speaks volumes
for its supposed concern for the health of the people. The emphasis
The reaction from the liberalisation brigade and their poster boys has been nauseating. After the study was published, a very familiar anchor in one English news channel was seen smirking at and hectoring MPs for having dared to ban Pepsi and Coke from parliament. The same news channel ran a programme
titled: “Villains or Victims”! Pepsi and Coke as victims should qualify as the news scoop of the millennium! In most metropolitan newspapers the story had vanished from the front page within a couple of days. Big money has obviously been doing some plain talking! Lest we forget - the Indian soft
drink
industry is worth Rs 6,000 crore, and 85 per cent of the market is controlled by
Pepsi and Coca Cola. They are among the biggest advertisers on Television and in
the print media. We can soon expect to see planted stories appearing on their
behalf in the media.
Coke
and Pepsi must go not just because they contain liberal dollops of pesticides.
They must go because of their track record globally and in this country. They
must go because even minus pesticides, they are junk and
In India, both these companies have bought acres of prime land to set up their manufacturing facilities. In Maharashtra and many other regions their operations have starved the local population of water. Thousands have been agitating against this practice of the Indian government, which has sold the water rights of the people to corporates like Pepsi and Coke. Recently the BBC broke a story that is even more damning. It now transpires that as a philanthropic gesture, Coke in Kerala had been supplying, free of cost, sludge from their factory to be used as fertiliser to local farmers. The catch in this tale of corporate munificence is that this sludge is laced with cadmium, a deadly poison! The Kerala State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) has confirmed the presence of the carcinogenic metal cadmium in waste material generated by the Coca-Cola plant at Plachimada in Kerala’s Palakkad district. The sludge being supplied to farmers was found to contain 201.8 mg of cadmium per kg of dry weight, against the tolerable limit of 50 mg. The factory has been asked to stop supplying the sludge as fertiliser to
farmers
in the locality, and to keep the material in ‘seepage-proof’ conditions.
Let
us now turn to something about Coke and Pepsi that is rarely discussed.
Mercifully they do not contain cocaine any more, and one assumes that they do
not deliberately add pesticides. But what they contain is almost as harmful for
health. The first problem is that soft drinks provide no nutritional value, but
supply “empty” calories - that is just plain sugar (a
bottle
of coke contains the equivalent of 11 teaspoons of sugar).
This is a deadly
combination when consumed by people with sedentary (not active)
Another active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. It is highly acidic, with a pH value of 2.8. It is thus highly corrosive and can dissolve a nail in about 4 days. One can imagine what that would do to the teeth of children who consume Coke in large quantities. Phosphoric acid also dissolves out calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis - a disease characterized by thinning of bones that leads to easy fractures Studies have also implicated phosphoric acid as a causative
agent
of kidney stones.
This
then is what the votaries of “free market” want protected. Coke and
Pepsi typify the consumerist culture being promoted in the country today.They
must go because they are poisoning a whole generation of children and young
adults. They must go because they ravage the land where it is