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>> 203 8 Water for Life, Not for Coca-Cola Transnational Systems of Capital and Activism Amanda Ciafone Over the last decade, several rural communities around Coca-Cola plants exploded in protest against the company’s exploitation of groundwater in the production of bottled drinks amid a growing national crisis of water scarcity. As demonstrated in the vibrant ongoing struggle in Mehndiganj, Uttar Pradesh, these mobilizations articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and Indian neoliberalism, illuminating the dispossession of the resources of the rural poor for consumption by those on the other side of a widening economic divide in the nation’s vaunted new freer marketplace. After local political and economic elites failed to respond to these resource struggles, activists created links to disparate sites of protest against Coca-Cola and distant allies. This network remapped Coke’s corporate world system, allowing local activists to bring multinational pressure against the multinational 204 > 205 Coca-Cola Company dramatically reentered an India opening itself up to foreign corporations through economic liberalization. The government launched a wave of economic reforms in the early 1990s curbing the role of the state in the market, including the approval of foreign investment, privatizations in the public sector, dissolution of the “license raj” regulatory regime, and removal of restrictions on multinational corporations, including the prohibition of the sale of products under international trademarks. The Coca-Cola Company had long been eager to return to India, one of the largest markets of the “sweat belt,” as company executives called the hot, developing countries of the Global South with large Muslim and/or Hindu populations that looked down on alcohol consumption and thus held vast potential profits for the soft drink industry.1 Now was the company’s chance: it spent $1 billion in the following ten years buying out the largest Indian soft drink producer and reestablishing its global brands and bottling system in one of the country’s largest foreign investments.2 With Coca-Cola’s sudden , almost ubiquitous reappearance at the moment of liberalization, it became both an aspirational sign of global consumer citizenship for India’s urban middle classes and an emblematic brand of neoliberal globalization for those dispossessed of resources to fuel their consumption. The Coca-Cola Company located much of its production in places like Mehndiganj, rural communities outside of larger metropolitan areas, to access reserves of water as well as cheap labor. This was in line with the Indian government’s greater reliance on market-led forces to fuel the economic development of rural India, as it disavowed previous rural social and economic welfare policies and overlooked the lack of existing environmental regulations. In this context, state and local governments compete to attract corporations by creating industrial areas and offering financial incentives, such as tax exemptions, to encourage industries to invest in “backward” areas.3 Here the majority of residents are landless or land-poor agricultural workers who are under extreme economic and environmental stress, part of what has been called an agrarian crisis in India.4 The roots of this crisis are deep: the earlier socialist state’s agrarian planned economy, which fed India’s large population and reduced its vulnerability to famine, also overexploited water and land with intensive irrigation and agrochemical application . Liberalization has since compounded this toll on rural India with 206 > 207 liters of water are extracted each day, constituting what villagers and activists call “water mining.”10 Withdrawal is far higher during the hot months when more soft drinks are sold, coinciding with the time of year when farmers’ lands and wells become parched in advance of the increasingly erratic monsoon rains.11 Groundwater extraction is virtually unregulated as a colonial-era law gives landowners private property rights not only to their land but to whatever groundwater lies underneath .12 Although national and Uttar Pradesh state water policy statements acknowledge worsening water scarcity and disparity, and specify that drinking water and irrigation are higher priorities than industrial uses, few states have implemented water resources legislation.13 Thus, the Coca-Cola Company was not required to provide assessments of the potential environmental impact of its proposed plants on water resources, while the company’s proprietary internal studies were focused solely “on ensuring a sustained supply of water for business operations” and were never made public.14 The local panchayat (village council) granted a procedural permission for the plant’s operation with no conditions on the amount of groundwater withdrawn, only requiring payment of minimal annual taxes and...

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