PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4
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activities (Agrawal and Narain 1991). The Coca-Cola–Pepsi campaign is of a piece
with one of the earliest issues taken up by CSE, namely global warming and the
injustice inherent in the demand of the developed countries for the imposition
of caps on greenhouse gas emissions by the developing countries. The position
on global warming attests to its international orientation and sensitivity to the
structural inequities of the global political economy. Environmental organizations
such as Greenpeace play a bridging role between the concerns of the affected local
communities and global environmental discourses centered on issues such as
biosafety and public health, and entailing conceptions of accountability in governance,
transparency, sustainability, and efficiency (Hindu 2005a, 2005b). Similarly,
the business practices of The Coca-Cola Company in India, and elsewhere, have
come under increased scrutiny, internationally, from networks of environmental
and human rights groups. After the adverse impacts of Coca-Cola plants on the
environment—especially groundwater overexploitation and the effects on local
communities—became widely known, a number of U.S. universities responded by
banning Coca-Cola products on their campuses. 4 The increasing enmeshing of environmental
and broadly “civic” (Chatterjee 2004) concerns has led to the blurring
of the boundary between various environmentalisms and their seemingly divergent
objectives. One of the results has been the increased embededness of environmental
NGOs in international networks of donors and supporters, thus leading to the mobilization
of significant resources, and providing visibility and legitimacy to these
issues.
Another outcome has been that the role of the environmental NGOs is increasingly
to translate what would be local concerns related to sectional interests—often
pertaining to minorities, albeit affluent ones—into an environmental vocabulary
with universalist claims. The sense of environmental entitlement is often expressed
in the language of rights, such as, the “right to clean air,” which in turn is grounded
in the scientistic discourse of individual risk and public health. What is elided in this
discourse is the disproportionate burden borne by the working poor for enforcing
these “environmental rights” on the behalf of affluent minorities. Therefore, in their
discursive construction of the environment as a site for consumption, the new environmentalism
effaces production and producers—an ideological sleight-of-hand
it shares with much of the neoliberal dogma. 5 Middle-class environmental organizations,
unable to mobilize and sustain broad coalitions, have thus increasingly
resorted to the use of courts in coaxing an apathetic state to action, a strategy
that has been well documented to lead to outcomes congruent with middle-class
interests (Greenough 2006).