Coca-Cola promises to
protect land rights of farmers, also in Swaziland
Kenworthy News Media, November 15, 2013
“The Coca-Cola Company commits to zero tolerance for land grabbing,”
Coca-Cola said in a statement last week, the company promising to stop all
business dealings with subsidiaries that are involved in land grabs, where land
is taken from poor people in developing countries without their consent, writes
Kenworthy
News Media.
The move comes after 250,000 people had signed a petition in connection
with international NGO Oxfam’s campaign for food and beverage companies such as
Coca-Cola to respect the land rights of local communities, and Oxfam had “found
evidence of land grabs and disputes by companies that supply sugar for
Coca-Cola” – the world’s largest buyer of sugar.
Coca-Cola further promised to “protect the land rights of farmers and
communities in the world’s top sugarcane-producing regions, advancing its
ongoing efforts to drive transparency and accountability across its global
supply chain,” in a statement published on their website last week, also
promising “a commitment to sustainably source … sugar cane” by 2020.
A very necessary move, since the harvesting of sugar cane is “the most
hazardous” of all forms of agricultural work, according to Human Rights Watch,
and since sugar “has been driving large-scale land acquisitions and land
conflicts at the expense of small-scale food producers and their families,”
according to a recently published report from Oxfam.
According to Communications Director for Coca-Cola Nordic, Mikael Bonde Nielsen, these promises of protection of
rights and sustainability also apply to Swaziland. “Our expectations of our
suppliers are the same no matter where they operate. This also applies to
Swaziland,” he tells Africa Contact.
Coca-Cola has a huge concentrate-manufacturing plant in Swaziland that
supplies the growing African market for Coca-Cola. A subsidiary of Coca-Cola,
Conco, buys Swazi sugar for the production of Coca-Cola concentrate, a major
export for Swaziland that makes up as much as 40 per cent of Swaziland’s GDP.
In Swaziland, the problem of land grabbing is exacerbated by the fact
that Swaziland’s absolute monarch, King Mswati III, controls all publically
owned land, and that his chiefs do his bidding in ejecting people from the land
they live on and cultivate if they disobey him or them in any way.
So it is urgent that Coca-Cola acts on their promises. For instance that
they investigate and reveal how the land on which the sugar for the products
that are produced in Swaziland has been acquired, and how the sugar production
on this land effects the subsistence farmers who live nearby.
The problem is that the issues of land usage and the effects of the
sugar production of Coca-Cola’s suppliers cannot be separated from the
autocratic political system in Swaziland.
But Mikael Bonde Nielsen says that Coca-Cola is not about to change
their approach in regard to the political situation in the countries in which
they operate. “Coca-Cola does not interfere in to the political affairs of
sovereign states.”
Indeed, Coca-Cola is on good terms with Swaziland’s absolute monarch
King Mswati III, with whom Coca-Cola’ says they have a “solid relationship”
that they sincerely appreciate.
The UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights stipulates that
businesses have responsibilities across their entire supply chain. “Business
enterprises should respect human rights … [the principles exist] independently
of States’ abilities and/or willingness to fulfill their own human rights
obligations … The responsibility to respect human rights requires that business
enterprises … seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are
directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business
relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.”
See also
CALL TO BOYCOTT
COCA-COLA
COCA-COLA
SUPPORTS SWAZI DICTATOR
COCA-COLA
COLONISES SWAZILAND
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