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“Killer Coke” Struggle Comes to
Vancouver
By Chinmoy
Banerjee
The growing struggle against Coca-Cola came
to Vancouver with a public forum on October 29, organized by the South
Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) with the support of
Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) at Simon Fraser
University. The event added to other happy developments in recent days:
Students at McMaster University had voted to end the exclusive contract
with Coca-Cola at their university the previous week, and on October 26
the student movement against Coke declared the day the beginning of the
first International Week of Action Against Coke and for Human Rights.
SANSAD is launching a campaign in the Vancouver region to inform the
public regarding Coke’s record of human rights violations, environmental
damage, and attacks on unions, in order to stimulate opposition to Coke on
university and college campuses and to mobilize public opinion against
Coca-Cola.
The offenses of Coca-Cola, which make it one of the ten worst corporations
in the world, are well known to those who are already engaged in the
struggle against corporate globalization, but are largely unknown to the
general public. Nor is the labour movement in Canada -- though it is
supportive of the struggle of Sinaltrainal, the union engaged in struggle
against Coke in Colombia -- informed about the popular struggle against
Coca-Cola in India. SANSAD’s project is to remedy this information gap in
the Vancouver area and contribute to the consolidation of the opposition
to Coca-Cola.
Though it is necessary to isolate Coca-Cola for its abusive practices, the
opposition to “Killer Coke” is larger than its target, since Coca-Cola’s
operations are only symptomatic of the current regime of transnational
capital. As Gary Teeple of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Simon Fraser University pointed out at the SANSAD forum, since WWII, and
particularly since the 1970s, the world has increasingly moved toward the
creation of instruments to promote and facilitate the operation of
transnational capital, enabling the privatization of resources, subsidized
by the nation state, which is also entrusted with the responsibility of
policing domestic private property relations. Privatization by the
national state increasingly provides exclusionary rights to most aspects
of life, including water, producing profit for the few at the expense of
the majority and the environment.
Alfredo Porras, a trade unionist in Colombia who had been imprisoned on
false charges and subjected to assassination attempts at the instigation
of Coca-Cola, corroborates Teeple’s analysis with concrete experience. For
instance, the development of a neo-liberal regime in Colombia, within
which Coca-Cola funds the election of right wing parties, enables the
company to bypass the employer-employee relationship by engaging
contractors for the supply of labour and using the armed paramilitary to
break attempts by unions to organize. To ensure a docile work force it
hires teenage workers to deliver its products. It pollutes the rivers with
caustic soda used to clean its bottles. A country rich in fresh water
resources is burdened with the pollution of its water. Any attempt to
challenge Coke’s abuses is met with the violence of the state.
Harsha Walia, a South Asian activist and writer who has participated in
the struggle against Coke in India, points out that Coke has drained the
water where it has bottling plants to the extent that water-rich Kerala is
short of water at Placimada, where Coke has a plant; that fifty villages
in water-scarce Rajasthan are in a state of drought because of Coke’s
water consumption; that near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh the water table has
gone down 15 feet; that Coke has been able to buy an entire river in
Maharashtra, and that it has polluted land and water with heavy metals. A
protest against Coke in Varanasi was brutally suppressed with four deaths
and the arrest of more than three hundred.
But, on the positive side, there is strong resistance to Coke in India:
For four years the Placimada plant has had a 24-hour vigil every day at
its gate and for the last year and a half it has been shut down because
the local village government refused to allow it to extract 500,000 liters
of water a day. Although Coca-Cola won a decision by the Kerala High Court
on September 7, the Government of Kerala—in an unusual move for a
government--has taken the matter to the Supreme Court. In Tamil Nadu,
although the state government has allowed Coca-Cola to build what would be
the largest plants in India, the people have been demonstrating against
the plans. In both Kerala and Tamil Nadu, local elections have shown the
people’s support for those who oppose Coca-Cola.
To oppose Coca-Cola, then, is not simply to oppose one player in the
market, thus enriching other players and legitimizing the market as such.
It is to target an exemplar of the regime of transnational capital in
order to develop our consciousness about this regime and empower people in
resistance to it.
Close to home the situation at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is
paradigmatic: UBC signed a contract with Coke in 1995 and, subsequently,
many water fountains on campus were turned off or allowed to sit in
disrepair, in order to compel people to buy Coke products.
It is time to end this contract and affirm people’s right to free, public
water, produced economically by our taxes. The fight against Coke is not
only a fight for the rights of labour and for human rights; it is also a
fight for water, and a fight against the neo-liberal regime of
transnational capital.
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Chinmoy Banerjee is a member of the South Asian Network for Secularism and
Democracy.
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