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Description
Flashcards by s.ghillean, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by s.ghillean
almost 11 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Important information | Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant in the village of Kaladera in Rajasthan India in 1999. Rajasthan is well known as a desert state, and Kaladera is a small, impoverished village characterised by semi-arid conditions. |
| Benefits | - produces more jobs - encourages industry |
| issues | It takes almost three litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola. In order to satisfy this need, Coca-Cola is increasingly taking over control of aquifers in communities around the world. These vast subterranean chambers hold water resources collected over many hundreds of years. |
| water levels | Farmers rely on access to groundwater for the cultivation of their crops but since Coca-Cola's arrival, they have been confronted with a serious decline in water levels. Locals are increasingly unable to irrigate their lands and sustain their crops, putting whole families at risk of losing their livelihoods. |
| protests | Official documents from the government's water ministry show that water levels remained stable from 1995 until 2000, when the Coca-Cola plant became operational. Water levels then dropped by almost 10 metres over the following five years. Local villagers near the city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh complain that the company's over-exploitation of water resources has taken a heavy toll on their harvests and led to the drying up of wells. As in Rajasthan and Kerala, villagers have held protests against the local Coca-Cola plant for its appropriation of valuable water resources. |
| plant closed down | In the now infamous case of Plachimada in the southern state of Kerala, Coca-Cola's plant was forced to close down in March 2004 after the village council refused to renew the company's licence, on the grounds that it had over-used and contaminated local water resources. Four months earlier, the Kerala High Court had ruled that Coca-Cola's heavy extraction from the common groundwater resource was illegal, and ordered it to seek alternative sources for its production. |
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