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Anti-Coke Activists Hold Panel, Pursue Shareholder Action
Arthur Chu
The Phoenix (Swarthmore College)
April 20, 2005
A large crowd of students, borough residents and parents who had arrived
for Family and Friends Weekend gathered in the Scheuer Room last Friday
to hear two leading anti-Coca-Cola activists, Ray Rogers and Amit
Srivastava, recount the history of their grievances against the corporation
and lay out their plans for future action.
The event was organized by the Kick Coke Campaign, a student organization
founded this semester to advocate that Swarthmore end its contract
with Coca-Cola and stop serving Coca-Cola beverages on campus. The
Swarthmore Kick Coke Campaign is working in concert with the national
Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, of which Rogers currently acts as director;
the campaign has helped organize over 80 anti-Coca-Cola campus groups
across the country.
Rogers opened by contrasting the colorful merchandise in the World
of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta with the “World of Killer Coke,” a
“world of lies, deception, corruption and gross human rights abuses.”
He described an incident in Colombia in 1996 when company-sanctioned
right-wing paramilitaries murdered union leader Isidro Gil and burned
down union offices in an effort to force workers to abandon the SINALTRAINAL
union. “The plant managers had already prepared their resignation
forms for them,” said Rogers. “What choice did they have?” Quoting
one SINALTRAINAL representative, he said, “If we lose this battle
against Coca-Cola, first we will lose our union; then we will lose
our jobs; then we will lose our lives.”
“This is not an aberration,” Rogers said, referring to similar attacks
against Guatemalan Coca-Cola employees in the 1980s, when “a huge
international campaign of protests and boycotts kept the Guatemalan
trade union movement alive.” “This time,” he said, “we need to step
up and say, ‘We’re going to put a stop to this and we’re never going
to let it happen again.’”
Amit Srivastava, the director of Global Resistance, a member of the
People’s Forum Against Coca-Cola, named South Asia as his stop on
the “world tour of the World of Killer Coke.” Srivastava attacked
Coca-Cola’s water usage policies, which he claimed have left at least
six rural communities with a severely lowered water table, with the
remaining groundwater severely polluted by cleaning agents. “Given
that today, over 70 percent of Indians make a living directly or indirectly
related to agriculture,” said Srivastava, “if you take away the water,
then poison the water and the land, it’s a sure recipe for disaster.”
Srivastava also mentioned that Coca-Cola had offered solid wastes
to local farmers as fertilizer that, in a BBC-sponsored study in which
Srivastava participated, were found to have high levels of toxic heavy
metals. He described the findings of the New Delhi Center for Science
and Environment, which reported that Coca-Cola’s products in India
contain 34 times the amount of pesticide contaminants allowable in
the United States or Europe. Srivistava cited this as “yet another
clear example of a double standard held by a multinational corporation
for developing countries.”
Srivastava, too, ended on a positive note, talking about the strength
and speed of the growth of grassroots activism “in a country where
the memory of Bhopal is still fresh for many,” and citing recent challenges
by local village councils to the expansion of Coca-Cola plants as
“Indians teaching the world a thing or two about how to defend common
property.” Even so, he emphasized the need for international support
for such movements: “Your role is cut out. You, living in the United
States, have, relatively speaking, much more power over these companies.”
After the event, Rogers said that his work with Swarthmore students,
including hiring Kaiko Shimura ’05 as an intern at the Campaign to
Stop Killer Coke, was an uplifting experience. “If you’re looking
for young people who can make the world a better place, you’ll find
them here,” said Rogers.
Sarah Roberts ’08, one of the event’s organizers, described her initial
doubts upon hearing about the campaign last semester — “Oh, another
boycott, how nice!” — but explained how she came to later change her
views, pointing to Rogers’ stated strategy of “creating a boycott
image without saying ‘boycott’.” “Boycotts focused on what individual
people choose to buy are very hard,” she said, “but this is focused
on institutions … People who really like Coke can choose to go to
the Ville and buy their own, without Swarthmore lending its name to
it.” She described campus response to the campaign as initially slow,
but was optimistic. “I respect that Swatties won’t just sign the petition;
they’ll read the documents. But everyone we’ve talked to has either
been really supportive or wanted to learn more.”
Swarthmore was Rogers and Srivastava’s last stop on a speaking tour
of colleges in the Northeast, to culminate in demonstrations at the
Coca-Cola shareholders meeting in Wilmington, Del. on Tuesday. Treasury
Operations assistant Carmen Duffy, Alix Gould-Werth ’07, Jonathan
Petkun ’07 and Charlie Sussman ’05 attended the meeting on behalf
of the Committee for Socially Responsible Investing. The CSRI had
previously decided to vote in favor of a shareholder resolution written
by the New York City Pension Funds demanding that Coca-Cola open an
independent investigation into allegations of anti-union violence
in Colombia. Gould-Werth and Petkun are both also members of the Kick
Coke Campaign.
Gould-Werth, who first wrote the CSRI proposal that Swarthmore support
the resolution with its 58,000 shares, said, “We thought it’d be cool
to go and speak in favor of the resolution … The meeting was extremely
dominated by stuff the Kick Coke Campaign has been working on, the
Indian water rights issue and the Colombian labor issue.”
Petkun was one of the shareholder representatives who spoke up at
the meeting, confronting Coca-Cola Chairman E. Neville Isdell about
whether plans existed to respond to the NYC Pension Fund resolution.
“[Isdell] denied all activist allegations, of course, as was to be
expected,” said Gould-Werth. “Jon tried to ask his question early
on, and [Isdell] claimed he’d already addressed it and kept trying
to cut him off, but he kept asking anyway and forced him to answer
… That was our moment.”
Petkun remembered a high level of activist presence at the meeting:
“There were maybe a few hundred people there, and out of them maybe
50, 60, even a hundred were activists.” Gould-Werth added, “There
were big demonstrations outside, but there were almost as many activists
inside the meeting as outside.”
Gould-Werth and Petkun were both excited about the possibility of
imminent change. “We’ve been working on this as the CSRI since the
very beginning of our term,” said Petkun. “The goal for us was to
bird-dog the issue on the Coke people … The more you get the issue
in front of them, the more you pressure them, the more you have to
do something about it.”
The resolution did not pass but did gain five percent of the shareholder
vote, which Petkun described as highly successful for a new resolution.
“It’s enough for the issue to stay in front of people for enough time
to get that critical mass … through resolutions, people writing letters,
things like the Kick Coke campaign. I think [Coca-Cola] will have
to respond in the next few years.”
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