Cutting ties with Coke

There’s nothing like a nice cold Mountain Dew to quench my thirst – it is just so sweet and delicious. I, along with many other students, cannot have Mountain Dew, or many other drinks, because of Coca-Cola’s exclusive selling rights on this campus. Campus businesses are forced to purchase strictly from Coca-Cola, which limits variety and prevents us from having drinks like Mountain Dew.

Selling the rights brings in a lot of money to support sports and other university programs, but working with a company that has a history of human rights abuses is not appropriate for a university that claims to be socially responsible.

Coca-Cola is involved with the assassination of union leaders in Colombia and draining water resources in India. Our long-standing collaboration with Coca-Cola needs to come to an end.

The Solidarity Center reports that since 1991 about 2,000 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia, and in the past 20 years about 4,000 trade unionists were murdered. In 2006 alone, 78 trade unionists were murdered. It is commonly said that Columbia is a country where union work is like carrying a tombstone on your back.

According to Corporate Campaign, Inc., Coca-Cola was involved in murdering eight union leaders in Colombia. In a lawsuit filed in Miami on July 2001, eyewitness accounts detailed the violence against workers of a Coca-Cola plant in Colombia, and the murder of Isidro Gil, an executive union leader.

The eyewitnesses explained that Gil was shot 10 times as soon as an armed group of thugs came to the Colombian Coca-Cola plant. Later that day, another union leader was kidnapped and union offices were set on fire. The next day, the armed group told workers to quit the union by 4 p.m. or they would be killed.

In fear, the union members resigned and the union was destroyed. The plant managers had a history working with the paramilitary and replaced workers that fled with cheaper laborers.

Laborrights.org stated, “Multinational corporations operating in Colombia have capitalized on the violent anti-union atmosphere created by armed paramilitary groups for their own profit.”

Coca-Cola is responsible for its workers here in the U.S. and abroad. A single plant that threatens their workers makes the corporation as a whole responsible. Instead of denying any wrongdoing, the company needs to redress its wrongs.

The Coca-Cola problem exists in India as well, where Coca-Cola plants are draining water where it is scarce. The plant uses water to bottle their products, while surrounding communities suffer from drought and pollution. According to The Independent, a Plachimada farmer said his irrigation pump “used to run for 12 hours throughout the night; now it runs dry after 30 minutes. Coke managed to acquire all the lowest lying land in the area and after digging a series of deep wells they took all the water. It’s downright theft.”

The Polaris Institute reported that in June 2005, “the state Water Resources Department found that in 16 wells around the plant water levels dropped significantly in nine of them while one dried up completely between 2002 and 2004. The study also found that between May 2003 and May 2004 ground level dropped in 11 of the 16 wells.”

After the local community organized and protested the plant, a court ruled that Plachimada had the right to control their water supply and could halt the plant’s water exploitation. There are still plants across India that continue to exploit local water resources.

Coca-Cola plants in India also produce toxic products. The Indian parliament banned Coca-Cola products from its cafeterias after discovering that they were unsafe to drink.

In 2004, the India Resource Center reported that “the ban came as the result of tests, including those by the Indian government, which found high concentrations of pesticides and insecticides, including lindane, DDT, malathion and chlorpyrifos, in the colas, making them unfit for consumption. Some samples tested showed the presence of these toxins to be more than 30 times the standard allowed by the European Union. Tests of samples taken from the US of the same drinks were found to be safe.”

Coca-Cola is responsible for human rights violations related to its business practices. Colleges across the nation are kicking Coca-Cola off their campuses, including New York University and Rutgers University, along with our neighbors at Smith College and Hampshire College.

“Smith’s relationship with Coca-Cola spans some five decades,” said Carol T. Christ, president of Smith College. “In severing our ties with the Coca-Cola Corporation, Smith joins other institutions and organizations around the world in urging Coca-Cola to take significant steps toward more responsible business practices across all realms of its operations.”

Earthfoods, the People’s Market, Greeno Sub Shop and the Newman Café are the only places of refuge free from Coca-Cola’s reach at UMass. Members of the UMass community need to resist the temptation to buy Coca-Cola products on campus to send a message that we stick by our socially responsible values, and to tell Coca-Cola to take its business elsewhere.

Ebad Rahman is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at erahman@student.umass.edu.