Op-ed: People’s health Vs MNCs

M V Ramana

Stricter pollution control laws in South Asia will need sustained campaigns for a better environment. Governments, who spend enormous amounts of money on the military and weapons purportedly to protect their citizens from various threats, will have to be forced to change their focus to real threats to people’s health

On August 5, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-governmental organisation based in New Delhi, announced that its laboratory had detected pesticide residues in 12 major soft drink brands, all manufactured by Pepsi or Coca Cola. Since applicable safety limits for such contamination have not been set in India, CSE compared these pesticide levels with limits set in the European Union and discovered that in many cases these levels grossly exceeded those standards.

The resulting uproar somewhat settled down last week when Indian Minister Sushma Swaraj stated in the parliament, ‘all the 12 samples do not have pesticide residues of the high order as was alleged in the CSE report’. Though disappointing and somewhat disingenuous, the government’s announcement is not altogether surprising, and is another instance of governments sacrificing the health and well-being of people for the interests of multinational corporations.

Behind all these events is the Centre for Science and Environment (http://www.cseindia.org/), an NGO started in 1980 by Anil Agarwal, an engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, to increase awareness about issues relating to environment and development. CSE first made its mark in 1982 through the publication of the ground-breaking report State of India’s Environment, which documented the environment deterioration in the country and how it affected the very survival of the poor. Since then CSE has worked on issues ranging from sustainable water harvesting to global warming to vehicular pollution, as well as publishing the fortnightly magazine Down to Earth. In February of this year, CSE released a report on pesticides in bottled water revealing levels of contamination, again much higher than EU norms. The natural follow-up then was to examine soft drinks, whose main constituent is water.

CSE analysed samples of twelve different brands of soft drinks, all purchased in Delhi, and looked for sixteen different pesticides, many of them toxic and having a range of negative health effects. The total concentration of pesticides in the 12 brands varied from 0.0055-0.0352 mg/L, with an average of 0.0168 mg/L. This is to be compared with the EU limit of 0.0005 mg/L.

Coke and Pepsi jointly attacked the report as baseless and stated, “We conform to all norms and are open to all testing by an internationally accredited independent laboratory and by experienced people.” The central government as well as various state governments ordered government run laboratories to test soft drink samples. These tests found the same pesticides, still in excess of EU norms but at levels lower than what CSE had reported. Though this contradicted Pepsi and Coke’s claim that they ‘conform to all norms’, the soft drink companies have nevertheless declared victory.

There is still the difference between the results of the government and CSE. As CSE points out, these differences ‘could be due to several reasons, such as the time of year in which they were manufactured and the manner in which the samples were collected. Pesticide contamination levels could vary depending on the seasons during which pesticides are used, and the dilution levels which depend on rainfall’. Further, unlike CSE, which has made its methodology transparent in its report, the government laboratories have not revealed how they arrived at their answer. One is expected to accept their results on the basis of their reputation.

The bottom line, however, is that Pepsi and Coca Cola are guilty of selling soft drinks contaminated with pesticides at high levels, at least by EU standards. One expects that they will control pesticide levels in their products for some time to come.

The larger question, though, has less to do with Coke and Pepsi but one of domestic laws on pollution control and their implementation. Why should third world countries be less stringent when it comes to protecting the health of their citizens? Part of the reason is public apathy. The main health impacts of contaminants like pesticides and radioactive waste like cancers occur in the long term.

The more rigorous European norms are a legacy of sustained campaigns by environmental groups and local citizens initiatives. However, these standards are threatened by the forces of globalisation, which put profits above people’s health. At the World Trade Organization, for example, domestic laws on pollution can be challenged as unfair trade practice. In 1999 the US claimed that a EU proposal to ban certain heavy metals in electronics equipment, to require a certain amount of recycled content and shift the cost of clean-up and disposal to the manufacturers, was illegal under WTO rules.

Multinational corporations also play off one country’s standards against the other. For example, Pepsi’s Managing Director in India has argued that European standards should not be followed in India. Asia Times reports that a group of foreign investors have warned that ‘penalizing companies which are fulfilling existing national norms... can have serious implications later on’.

There is also the other larger question of why pesticide levels are so high in water. The answer has to do with the practice of a certain kind of agriculture that involves the use of large quantities of chemicals — fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Once again multinational corporations play a role in promoting this — they sell the high-yielding seeds that require large inputs of these chemicals, which they manufacture. Ultimately all these profits accrue to them.

Agriculture in the US and Europe has similar characteristics too. But the effects on public health are better controlled. In the US, it was only in the 1970s, after the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring and the movement it catalysed, that levels of pesticides began to be regulated. Stricter pollution control laws in South Asia will also need sustained campaigns for a better environment. Governments, who spend enormous amounts of money on the military and weapons purportedly to protect their citizens from various threats, will have to be forced to change their focus to real threats to people’s health. Studies and exposés like the one by CSE should play an important part in such an effort.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

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