Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [73]
The company proposed to pay McCloud three hundred thousand dollars a year—about a tenth of a cent per gallon of water—going up to four hundred thousand dollars in year ten of a hundred-year contract. The fees were well under market rates, and the company would have the right to drill unlimited boreholes and pump unlimited groundwater. When the McCloud Watershed Council polled local citizens, it found 77 percent opposed to the contract. The council also considered the environmental reviews grossly inadequate and found that truck traffic would be disruptive and dangerous. To those residents of Fryeburg keeping tabs from three thousand miles away, the scenario sounded distressingly familiar.
Is Nestlé really subverting democracy, as the antiprivatization groups suggest? The company participates in informational meetings, it shares its data (though perhaps not all of it), it pays for endless studies of aquifers, trucking routes, and traffic. Votes are taken. By and large, citizens rise to the occasion: they share information, collect their own data, and participate at a level that is, for many, unprecedented. This is democracy in action.
But only to a point. When a large corporation—with all the lawyers, PR professionals, and hydrological reports that money can buy—goes up against individual citizens, it’s hardly a level playing field. It’s nothing for Nestlé to make six-figure donations—perfectly legal—so that towns with perennial budget shortfalls can repair their roads or buildings. Money talks, especially in communities with high unemployment and a low tax base. Large corporations, because they make campaign contributions, employ hundreds, and add to state revenue, have friends in high places. Their permits are rubber stamped and they receive exemptions from statutes and grandfather status for activities no longer permitted.
In the spring of 2007, while Nestlé shareholders gathered in Switzerland for their annual meeting, the Sierra Club, a Nestlé shareholder, led a gathering of concerned citizens at the company’s Greenwich, Connecticut, headquarters. There, Ruth Caplan, chair of the Sierra Club’s Water Privatization Task Force, said that Nestlé has consistently failed to obtain explicit consent from communities affected by bottling operations at nearby water sources that serve the communities’ water needs. Her group called on Nestlé to “respect the right of local communities to exercise democratic control over the use of their water,” to let town residents vote on Nestlé activities, and to quit using its disproportionate resources to influence their decisions.
Activists repeatedly link small-town struggles against Nestlé in the United States with grassroots battles against transnationals in the developing world. Portrayed as good (poor people without water) against evil (corporations that buy and sell water), those struggles seem clear-cut to me. But the situation in Fryeburg isn’t so black-and-white. A faction here is okay with Poland Spring if it means the company will build a plant, which will bring jobs and money into town, or even if it simply agrees to make steady payments to the town. One could argue that pumping water in western Maine denies no one access to water, nor does the company force people to buy its green-wrapped bottles. Maybe not now, counter the activists, but that day may come: drought may strike this region—or a region elsewhere—and citizens may find private water trucks running when their taps do not. Remember, water is essential for life, and communities that don’t have it will either find a way to buy more or they will disappear. When that day arrives, whose hand do you want on the tap?
After two hours of debate in Fryeburg’s fire station,