Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.
Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatise the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter.
The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs [NGOs = Non-Government Organizations], who bang on about declaring water being a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.
Personally, I believe it’s better to give food stuff a value so we are all aware that it has its price and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water and there are many different possibilities there.”(source)
The technique Nestlé uses is this: Find an economically weak region, buy up the land surrounding the water source and grease the political wheels by making a proposal the residents can’t possibly refuse. How can depressed regions resist new jobs and added local revenue? But, the revenue generated by these regions natural resource by and large goes to a corporation headquartered in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. And if the financial incentives aren’t enough to assuage concerned citizens, Nestlé’s more than happy to battle it out in court. (source)
“We find it very troubling that the Ontario government has settled with Nestle,” Council of Canadians chair Maude Barlow said in a statement. “Ontario must prioritize communities’ right to water above a private company’s thirst for profit. Our government must think about water availability for our grand children, great grand children and beyond.”
“Under its current permit, Nestlé pays $3.71 for every million litres of water it pumps from the local watershed, which it then packages in single-use plastic bottles and sells back to the public for as much as $2 million,” the Council says.
But a Nestle spokesman told The Huffington Post Canada that the drought restrictions were only put in place due to an “administrative misunderstanding,” and mandatory rules were never the intent. (source)
A New York Times’ article on the scandal said one Jamaican family’s income “averaged only $7 a week,” leading the mother to dilute the water with as much as three times the recommended amount of water so she could feed two children.
“The results can be seen in the clinics and hospitals, the slums and graveyards of the Third World,” said War on Want. “Children whose bodies have wasted away until all that is left is a big head on top of the shriveled body of an old man.”
In the Times, United States Agency for International Development official, Dr. Stephen Joseph, blamed reliance on baby formula for a million infant deaths every year through malnutrition and diarrheal diseases. (source)
In a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to “discover” what much of the world has known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for “nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy”.
But instead of creating an artificial substitute, or fighting to make sure the remedy was widely available, Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission. Nestlé has filed patent applications — which are currently pending — around the world.
Prior to Nestlé’s outlandish patent claim, researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own. And Nestlé has done this before — in 2011, it tried to claim credit for using cow’s milk as a laxative, despite the fact that such knowledge had been in Indian medical texts for a thousand years. (source)
Mice bred to suffer from brain dysfunction and rapid aging were fed tea extracts and then locked in a dark chamber, where they received painful electric shocks to their feet. The mice were then killed. Mice bred to suffer from muscle degeneration were fed tea components, after which experimenters cut open the animals’ leg muscles and then decapitated them. Experimenters injected toxic chemicals into mice to destroy insulin-producing cells, causing the animals to develop diabetes. After this cruel procedure, the mice were force-fed tea extracts and then killed. After causing rats to suffer from high levels of fat and cholesterol in their bloodstreams, experimenters shoved tubes down the animals’ throats to force them to consume tea ingredients. The rats were then killed and dissected. (source)
A report of the Washington-based civil society organisation Fair Labor Association (FLA) has shown that child labour is still widespread on Ivory Coast cocoa farms supplying Nestlé. It was the first time that a multinational chocolate producer had allowed its procurement system to be completely traced and assessed.
The study had found numerous violations of internal work rules and children’s rights. The most common tasks carried out by children on cocoa farms are filling plastic bags for nurseries, breaking up pods and transporting plants, according to the FLA. Under local law, carrying heavy loads is one of the worst forms of child labour, and the use of machetes and knives to break pods is a hazardous task. The report also found rampant injuries, mainly with machetes that slice into the children’s legs as they harvest the cocoa pods, as well as both adults and children working long hours without pay. Nestlé has announced to improve its monitoring mechanisms in its cooperatives. (source)
