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TERI Report on Coke in India: An Attempted Whitewash Gone AwryTo a corporate giant like The Coca-Cola Company, $2 million is insignificant pocket change - literally a drop in the ocean of money it extracts from the worldwide markets where its overpriced, often unhealthy beverages are sold.So, did Coca-Cola get its money's worth when it paid a New Dehli-based think tank $2 million for a "third-party assessment" of the environmental havoc it has wreaked in India?"From a PR standpoint, which has always been Coke's concern, it appears they did," said Ray Rogers, director of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke. "At the same time, it confirms Coke's gross misconduct with water management problems and how they caused environmental damage they've been denying for years."The report by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), 16 months in the making, noted that while the plants it evaluated — only six of more than 50 Coke operates in India - may have met some government regulatory standards, most did not achieve the wastewater standards set by the company itself because of "presence of faecal coliform and several other physico-chemical pollutants in the treated wastewater."TERI ignored, for reasons never explained, the Coke bottling plant in Plachimada, Kerala, that has been shut down since March 2004 after massive protests by activists from surrounding farms and communities devastated by water scarcity and pollution.However, the report said a watershed at Kaladera, Rajasthan, where one plant is located, has been so "overexploited" that Coke should consider relocating the plant or shutting it down.Misleading headlines (like "Coke Makes Cleanup Gains" in The Wall Street Journal) helped Coke apply its PR spin to the TERI story, but no amount of glib interpretation can hide the fact that Coke continues to cause devastating local water shortages.The report notes, for example, that Coke's choices on where to site their plants are "strictly business" decisions that cause great distress to local communities. It bluntly states that "community water issues do not appear to form an integral part of the water resource management practices of The Coca-Cola Company."It even points out that the company hampered TERI's assessment by refusing to share the environmental impact assessments for any one of the six plants.Perhaps most noteworthy of all, it validates the main concerns of protestors about water scarcity and pollution. "In general, the community perceptions were found in conformity to the results obtained from the detailed technical assessment of groundwater resources," the report said.Coke may claim to have been vindicated on the issue of pesticides since TERI said it detected none in the water at the six plants, despite Indian environmentalists' finding that showed dangerous levels in Coke drinks. But Coke is still doing its best to downplay or conceal the fact that TERI tested only water, not Coke productsAccording to the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), headed by Sunita Narain, who won the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize, Coca-Cola could not be described as pesticide-free, because only the water had been tested and not the rest of the ingredients. A CSE statement said: "TERI has not tested the final product, which we drink. The CSE study in 2003 and 2006 tested bottles of colas and found pesticides above safe limits in the drinks.""Coke's ability to influence the timing and media analysis of the TERI report made it well worth the company's piddling $2 million investment," said Rogers. "They wouldn't pay two bucks for a report they couldn't see first and sanitize as much as they could."The University of Michigan and Coca-Cola agreed to commission the TERI report after students argued that Coke's water-management practices violated the university's code of conduct for vendors. UM was among the largest of more than 46 colleges and universities that removed Coke products from campuses because of flagrant corporate irresponsibility overseas, particularly in India and Colombia.
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