A bitter taste

 
Last month PepsiCo won a battle against Coca-Cola when the City University of New York awarded the global conglomerate exclusive pouring rights in a $21 million deal to distribute its beverages to all 24 of CUNY's campuses.

Students and activists had crusaded relentlessly in the "Killer Coke" campaign against Coca-Cola’s presence on campus in an effort to expose its poor record of labor and human rights abuses, particularly with regard to the murder of union leaders in Colombia. The effectiveness of their campaign resulted in CUNY rejecting Coca-Cola's latest bid.

“The real drive behind that resolution was that we don’t do business with corporations that have issues with human rights and workers’ rights,” said David J. Rosenberg, the president of the student government on the Brooklyn campus.

But while campaigners deemed the move a victory against the corporate giant, any sense of triumph was quickly overshadowed by CUNY’s announcement that Pepsi would take its place. The decision is a slap in the face for activists who, after working tirelessly to boot Coke, are now faced with another transnational company that essentially reintroduces many of the same concerns as its predecessor, namely: a company concerned only with profit at the expense of the health and general wellbeing of the population.

Both Pepsi and Coke have been accused of producing unhealthy products, promoting false marketing campaigns and fueling the obesity epidemic in the United States. Both have also attempted to vary the way people think about water, from a basic human right to something to be bought and sold, through their bottled-water marketing.

As Michele Simon, author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back explained to AlterNet, “It is sad to see universities who are trying to do the right thing by keeping out a company like Coke with a horrible track record to then allow Pepsi, which may not be killing people in South America but is killing people in other ways, to take its place...Too often we are focused on one aspect of how a corporation does business, comparing evils to slightly lesser evils. ..to replace Coke with Pepsi isn’t a victory,"

While Pepsi has spent a vast majority of its PR campaigns focusing on how it actively participates in initiatives to address water challenges around the world, the impetus behind such a move is nothing more than a coordinated effort to promote a “profit-driven privatization scheme that undermines the human right to water and local, democratic control of global water resources,” as Corporate Accountability International (CAI) explained.

“Pepsi’s involvement with the 2030 Water Resources Group demonstrates how it has been colluding with water intensive industries and powerful institutions like the World Bank to make private controls of water by setting up water-for-profit systems," said Erin Diaz, campaign director of Think Outside the Bottle and Public Water Works at CAI. "In each of these Pepsi-funded projects, water rates are tied to paying off private investments from multinational corporations...Decisions that affect people's access to water around the globe need to remain with the people—through our public, democratic systems."

In 2003, Pepsi was criticized for the quality and quantity of water used in its beverages after the Centre for Science and Environment discovered that the water PepsiCo and other beverage companies in India were using contained toxins including pesticides which contribute to cancer. According to Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative, the CSE found that Pepsi had 36 times the level of pesticides permitted in tap water. As a result the Indian state of Kerala temporarily banned the sale of Pepsi.

In 2007, Pepsi’s Aquafina water brand was accused of using tap water to fill its bottles. Corporate Accountability International claimed Pepsi was not being transparent in its business practices and using falsely misleading advertising to suggest its water was from purified spring water when it in fact came from the tap. As a result of the watchdog’s group efforts, Pepsi placed the words “public water source” on its label. Most Americans don’t realize that water quality and labeling laws are not as strict in the US when it comes to bottled water versus tap water so people are actually paying 10,000 times the cost of tap water for the privilege of drinking an inferior product, according to SaveTheWater.org. One bottle of water takes 700 years to decompose with production of plastic water alone amounting to 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.