THE two leading soft drinks multinationals which enjoy a monopoly market of their products in most of the world have been put in the dock by one of India’s leading voluntary agencies, the Centre for Science and Environment, when it announced a fortnight ago that its laboratory tests showed that their soft drinks including the two famous brands contain unacceptably high levels of pesticide residues. The multinationals do not accept the findings.
The CSE, a prestigious NGO, analyzed samples of 12 major soft drinks, sold in and around New Delhi at its laboratories, and discovered that all of them contained residues of four extremely toxic pesticides and insecticides—lindane, DDT, malathion and chlorpyrifos. It is quite significant to note that when its laboratories tested samples of the same brands sold in the United States it found they did not contain any pesticide residue.
India has a $500 million soft drinks market. In 2001, Indians consumed over 6.5 billion bottles of soft drinks. The lab results proved depressing for the consumers and members of the parliament in New Delhi were too quick to react by removing the two well-known beverages from MPs’ canteen menu. On August 7, a prestigious engineering university in the southern state of Tamil Nadu also banned the drinks from its campuses.
The chiefs of the Indian subsidiaries of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were, however, equally quick to refute the charges and called the CSE findings ‘unfair’ saying the multinationals were being subjected to a ‘trial by media’. They were of the opinion that an independent inquiry led by India’s top scientists be carried out to settle the issue.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of India on Wednesday asked Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages to withdraw its petition, saying there were no grounds for the Court to hear the issue. Mr Justice S Rajendra Babu, Dr Justice AR Lakshmanan and Mr Justice GP Mathur said there were no grounds for Coca-Cola to file, particularly on grounds of Article 32 of the Indian Constitution (which provides the right to approach the court for enforcement of a fundamental right). The counsel for Coco-Cola, Mr Sibal, then pleaded to have the petition be treated as a ‘consumer petition’, saying Coca-Cola was filing the petition to protect the consumers’ rights. This was once again rejected.
Mr Justice Babu said consumers could decide for themselves what they wanted, and it was up to them to decide whether they want to buy a product.
In response to Mr Sibal’s plea that several states had banned their products, and if the court did not entertain their plea, they would have to file in various state courts, Mr Justice Babu said if they could sell their products in all the states, they could file petitions in all the states.
On August 8, the Delhi High Court in response to a petition filed by PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd and others has decided to set up an expert committee to review the findings of pesticide residues in carbonated soft drinks. The experts’ findings are to be made available in 3 weeks.
In Pakistan, not much activism of this kind is in evidence to establish efficacy of food products. However, in a hearing held by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Islamabad, secretary of science and technology division had revealed on July 2, 2002 that eleven out of 21 mineral or drinking water brands available were found contaminated and unfit for human consumption but these continued to be sold in the market. He was quoting a joint study conducted by Consumer Rights Commission of Pakistan and Pakistan Council for Research in Water Resources and released on April 18, 2001.
The contaminated brands were Sparklets, Musafa, Cool, Rainbow, Pearl, Safa, Zam Zam, Fresh, Musaffa, Wellgreen and Himalaya. The safe brands were Nestle, Aqua Flow, Ava, Abe Hayat, Evian, Max Wellpu, Aqua Safe, Niagra, Perrier and Brecon Carreg. Samples of these brands were collected from various places in Rawalpindi-Islamabad area in the presence of Food Department officials.
One may recall that Coca-Cola, the world’s most valuable brand, having a $70 billion market, is already defending charges made by British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 last month that waste sludge distributed to farmers from its plant at Plachimada in southern Kerala state has high concentrations of the toxic metal cadmium.
In February this year, the CSE had badly exposed the bottled water industry when its laboratory had found pesticide residues in bottled water as well sold in Delhi and Mumbai.
This time, it analysed the contents of 12 cold drink brands. They were tested for organochlorine and organophophosphorus pesticides and synthetic pyrethroids — all commonly used in India as insecticides. The test results were as shocking as those of the bottled water. In all samples, levels of pesticide residues far exceeded the maximum residue limit for pesticides in water used as ‘food’, set down by the European Economic Commission (EEC). Each sample had enough poison to cause - in the long term - cancer, damage to the nervous and reproductive systems, birth defects and severe disruption of the immune system.
Following were the CSE findings:
(1) Market leaders Coca-Cola and Pepsi had almost similar concentrations of pesticide residues. Total pesticides in all Pepsi brands on an average were 0.0180 mg/l (milligramme per litre), 36 times higher than the EEC limit for total pesticides (0.0005 mg/l). Total pesticides in all Coca-Cola brands on an average were 0.0150 mg/l, 30 times higher than the EEC limit.
(2) While contaminants in the Pepsi were 37 times higher than the EEC limit, they exceeded the norms by 45 times in the Coca-Cola.
(3) Mirinda Lemon topped the chart among all the tested brand samples, with a total pesticide concentration of 0.0352 mg/l.
Meanwhile, the news of the popular brands being impure infuriated the citizens in various cities. Activists from leading political parties such as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party launched a campaign against the great colas. They smashed cola bottles, and trampled on cardboard cups bearing their logos in Bombay last week.
In the 1970s, Coca-Cola was kicked out of India under an aggressive protest led by then trade union leader George Fernandes, who was then the finance minister and is now defence minister, when the soft drink multinational had refused to disclose its production formula and the ingredients included. The two companies, however, regained footholds in India in the early 1990s after a series of economic reforms introduced by the then Congress government.
The Pepsi and Coke chiefs, Bakshi and Gupta, think the CSE revelations may cause a temporary setback to their sales for about a week or so and then “we are sure the consumers will have the same confidence in us they have always shown.”
Delhi state health minister A K Walia, a qualified physician himself, has upheld the CSE findings. “They (CSE) are using sensitive, internationally accepted methods,” he said. The CSE scientists H. B. Mathur and Sapna Johnson say their basic inference was that, as with the bottled mineral water, the soft drink manufacturers were drawing their water supplies from groundwater that is heavily contaminated by years of indiscriminate pesticide use.
High pesticide residues were reported in groundwater around Delhi two years ago, when the government’s Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) carried out a study which also reported excessive salinity, nitrate and fluoride content besides traces of lead, cadmium and chromium.
Observers believe it is not easy to take the companies to court because they hide behind what is described as a “meaningless maze” of government regulations concerning the manufacture of soft drinks, which are completely ineffective and in fact designed to help the industry rather than consumers.
The Prevention of Food Adulteration (PFA) Act of 1954 and the Fruit Products Order (FPO) of 1955 — both aimed at regulating the quality of contents in beverages — do not even provide scope for regulating pesticides in soft drinks. Poor standards on food products are cited as one reason why India has not been able to make a dent in the international market.
In fact, the lucrative soft drink sector is given a highly favourable treatment by the bureaucracy to the extent that it is exempted from the provisions of industrial licensing under the Industries (Development and Regulation) Act, 1951.
In a July 25 report, The Guardian’s Paul Brown has said that the largest Coca-Cola plant in India is being accused of putting thousands of farmers out of work by draining the water that feeds their wells, and poisoning the land with waste sludge that the company claims is fertiliser.
The plant in the southern state of Kerala is designed to satisfy the demand for Coke in what has become the multinational company’s fastest growing market. But its huge demand for water is causing such damage to the local economy that the village council which had granted the company a licence to operate is now demanding the plant’s closure.
The charity ActionAid says the crisis facing the once prosperous farming area is an example of the worst kind of inward investment by multinational companies in developing countries. In a report to the World Trade Organisation’s meeting to be held at Cancun, Mexico, in September the charity says this kind of abuse must be controlled.
A BBC study has found that waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertiliser for local farmers contains toxic chemicals. Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala.
The chemicals were traced in an investigation by BBC Radio 4’s “Face The Facts” programme and prompted scientists to call for the practice to be halted immediately.