Bloomberg -Last year, U.S. bottled water sales reached $16 billion, up nearly 10 percent from 2015, according to Beverage Marketing Corp. They outpaced soda sales for the first time as drinkers continue to seek convenience and healthier options and worry about the safety of tap water after the high-profile contamination in Flint, Mich., about a two-hour drive from Mecosta. Nestlé alone sold $7.7 billion worth worldwide, with more than $343 million of it coming from Michigan, where the company bottles Ice Mountain Natural Spring Water and Pure Life, its purified water line.
The Michigan operation is only one small part of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company. But it illuminates how Nestlé has come to dominate a controversial industry, spring by spring, often going into economically depressed municipalities with the promise of jobs and new infrastructure in exchange for tax breaks and access to a resource that’s scarce for millions. Where Nestlé encounters grass-roots resistance against its industrial-strength guzzling, it deploys lawyers; where it’s welcome, it can push the limits of that hospitality, sometimes with the acquiescence of state and local governments that are too cash-strapped or inept to say no. There are the usual costs of doing business, including transportation, infrastructure, and salaries. But Nestlé pays little for the product it bottles—sometimes a municipal rate and other times just a nominal extraction fee. In Michigan, it’s $200.
In the U.S., Nestlé tends to set up shop in areas with weak water
regulations or lobbies to enfeeble laws. States such as Maine and Texas
operate under a remarkably lax rule from the 1800s called “absolute
capture,” which lets landowners take all the groundwater they want.
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In many areas of the world, from America to Zimbabwe, the 99% lack access to safe water, something which can be fatal, particularly for infants being nursed with reconstituted formula milk. And that safe water is quite possibly owned by Nestlé. At the World Water Forum in 2000, the then Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe was quoted as saying, 'access to water should not be a public right.' There was some consequent clarification about this remark, but not the ethical progress reformist groups are always clamouring for.
In October 2008 Nestlé stated 'bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world' That very month Taiwan banned the importation of milk products, including Nestlé's, from China as a result of them being contaminated. Was this an industrial accident or deliberate? 'Melamine can easily be mistaken for protein. Thus, Chinese dairy manufacturers illegally claimed higher levels of protein in their products through the use of cheaper melamine. In baby formulas, where protein amounts are so important, this led to severe deficiencies.'
Nestlé's tentacles reach out for our babies and cats. Yes, feeding Tibbles Purina 'may have also helped to support Nestlé’s use of slave labor in Thailand... Usually, the workers are immigrants, brought in from Thailand’s even poorer neighbors Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia. For the privilege of a Thai job, they are charged an illegal fee and trapped into working within the fishing industry to pay off heavy debt. A Burmese worker describes their working conditions: “Sometimes, the net is too heavy and workers get pulled into the water and just disappear. When someone dies, he gets thrown into the water.” '
Nestlé also profits from our class labouring in the chocolate industry -- 'an ugly affair, littered with allegations of malfeasance.' We are told that the deforestation crisis in Ghana and the Ivory Coast continues and that cocoa beans are grown illegally in protected forests. Numbers of chimpanzees and elephants have also decreased dramatically. Both countries plan to stop all new deforestation after The Guardian's report (8 November, 2017) found that the cocoa industry was responsible.
Reformists cannot see the wood for the trees. Nestlé ignoring European Union and American sanctions against Zimbabwe by buying milk from an expropriated farm given to Grace Mugabe, mislabelling the source of bottled water as Poland Spring, apparently being part of the price fixing of chocolate, and chasing the Ethiopian regime for losses of around $6 million during one of the region's unnecessary famines, all these are of great interest to reformists who champion all sorts of quack cures, temporary measures and moral crusades for such issues yet only serve to delay meaningful change. Anti-slavery traders ignore wage slavery, fair trade & free trade advocates fail to envision a world without trade, and arms controllers want peace in a capitalist world where war is endemic. The list goes on and on.
Most quoted material comes from Listverse (3 January, 2018)
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