By Harsha Walia, ZNet, December 30, 2004
The exceptional intensity of the emotions - disbelief, compassion, and global concern - displayed at the Asian Tsunami disaster is a prime example of the discourse of compassion and humanitarianism created and fostered by the political climate and media. Compared with the absence of this type of global concern for the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, in Iraq, in Rwanda, in Palestine, the compassion for more instantaneous “natural” disasters (a misnomer since the impact of such disasters is inextricably linked to the inequalities of empire) as opposed to the more readily preventative devastation of war, militarization and genocide brings to light the degree of indecency and schizophrenia of the colonial consciousness....
Political global compassion, we know quite well, is often an ideology of political and social control couched in euphemisms and contradictions of humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention is considered appropriate in the attempts to broaden the reach of so-called democracy. Since the end of the Cold War, interventionist tactics are now couched in the rhetoric of democracy and human rights, instead of Communism and more overt political ideologies, from Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq....
The biggest irony of all this is that Starbucks is donating money raised from coffee grown in Indonesia’s plantations and Coca Cola is sending bottled water to South Asia. The re-bottling, re-packaging, and re-corporatizing of our lands, our resources, our dreams, and our futures.
Coffee is the world’s second most globalized commodity - produced in 70 countries by more than 25 million farmers. Starbucks, in particular, has grown at an astounding rate: an average rate of 28 percent in the past five years with its market value reaching almost $15 billion in 2004. Meanwhile, the estimated 25 million coffee farmers exist at the bottom of the poverty scale. With increasing anti-corporate protests in the 1990’s, Starbucks jumped on the ‘corporate responsibility’ bandwagon with support for fair-trade coffee and organic farming. This still amounted to just 4-5 cents per cup at most for the farmers, compared with a beverage that actually sells for $2-5 and the amount of “fair-trade certified” coffee that Starbucks purchased in 2003 amounted to less than 1% of its bean purchases....
Coca Cola has been at the forefront of controversies it cannot afford: the United Steelworkers of America, on behalf of Sinaltrainal, have filed a lawsuit in the United States charging Coca-Cola with complicity in the murder, torture and intimidation of trade union organizers at Coca-Cola bottling facilities in Columbia. In India, communities around Coca-Cola's bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages; the groundwater and soil around its bottling plants have been polluted and Coca-Cola products in the Indian market contain extremely high levels of pesticides, including DDT, sometimes higher than 30 times those allowed by US or EU standards. Tests conducted by the BBC found cadmium and lead in the waste, effectively making the waste toxic waste. Coca-Cola stopped the practice of distributing its toxic waste only when ordered to do so by the state government. Millions of dollars of marketing cannot outweigh the increasing public resistance to the company’s practices and the unprecedented victories that have been won.... [Article continues]
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