The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [123]
The issue struck directly at the heart of urban India, where the majority of soft drinks were consumed. No longer was this a question of stealing water from poor farmers, this was a company poisoning everyone. Indian consumers, the findings implied, were not worth the same care that companies lavished on consumers in the United States and Europe where Coke was pesticide-free. Coke’s famous promise that its products were the same everywhere in the world had been exposed as a lie.
The day after the announcement, national pride kicked in. India’s right-wing Parliament immediately banned the sale of soft drinks in its cafeteria, while protesters in Mumbai (Bombay) symbolically broke Coke bottles and trampled on logo-bearing cups. Elsewhere, angry Indians tore down posters of Bollywood film stars Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, who’d just signed endorsement deals with the company. The reaction from the industry was swift, if cynical. “Within days, Coke’s men from the Hong Kong group office were in Delhi to personally assess the situation,” wrote Nantoo Banerjee, Coke’s former head of public relations, in a scathing tell-all about his former company. “The key message was: manage Parliament, manage ministers, and manage media. . . . To them, everything in India appeared to be ‘manageable’ with money and connections.” Led by Coca-Cola India, the soft drink industry published a full-page ad in India’s English-language newspapers stating on the basis of its own tests “we can safely assert that there is no contamination or toxicity whatsoever in our brand of beverages.” The facility CSE used to measure its own tests, the company went on to say, was not accredited highly enough, causing the tests to be hopelessly flawed.
The PR campaign did nothing to dim the public fury—sales of Coke plummeted more than 30 percent in just two weeks. The final blow came when a Joint Parliamentary Committee backed up CSE’s findings, saying its study was “correct on the presence of pesticide residues in . . . branded products of Coca-Cola.” The company changed courses to diffuse blame. Rather than claiming its drinks did not contain pesticides, it now argued it wasn’t their fault if they did, since hazardous chemicals were endemic to the Indian food and water supply. If the government didn’t enforce its environmental regulations, then how could the company be expected to abide by them? Coke, they argued, has just been singled out to further CSE’s own political agenda, exploiting the fact they were a foreign company to sway public opinion.
CSE’s Kushal Yadav, however, disputes Coke’s contention that “everything has pesticides.” In fact, he says, tests on fruits, vegetables, and sugar found relatively few cases of pesticide contamination. If soft drinks were contaminated, he concluded, it was from the groundwater that Coke was not cleaning—despite the state-of-the-art water-intake treatment system that the company now shows off at its plant in Mehdiganj.
Whatever the cause, the pesticide story garnered more anti-Coke press in a week than the struggles around groundwater depletion and contamination had in over a year. Coke’s most valuable asset—its brand—had been tarnished, and its reputation called into question. A public that had mostly ignored a problem affecting the very livelihood of some of the world’s most desperate people had been galvanized by contamination of a daily treat for the middle class. On the