I was there last spring, and my guide said Coca-Cola bribed the village curanderos (spiritual healers) to increase the consumption of Coke, so they incorporated it into religious rituals [0].
The water isn't safe to drink, and Coke can be cheaper than milk or formula, so many moms feed their babies Coke instead [1].
The point is, when the megacorp has subverted democracy from the national leaders [1] to the regional leaders all the way down to the village healers, how can you not hold the megacorp accountable?
[0] https://costumbresporelmundo.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/tum...
[1] http://robinewing.com/2013/09/22/cola-consumption-and-the-ch...
If you want to hold somebody accountable start with the guys peddling phony healing for dollars then move up from there to whoever is politically in charge of that region letting it go to shit, not hiring engineers and planners but instead cronies, and pocketing the rest of the federal money transfers. https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/publications/why-chiapas-p...
Investigators use the concept of cui bono to figure out who is ultimately responsible.
Who benefits?
Just because local distributors are doing the bribing doesn't insulate the megacorp from moral culpability for their actions.
By the way, the bribes often aren't in cash, they're free cases of Coke.
Lets say Chiapas (3.4 million people) has (10% population of Spiritual Healers) = 340,000 Spiritual Leaders.
Each spiritual leader will now purchase a 1 Liter coke for a religious ceremony EVERY DAY that they otherwise would not have. Coke costs .73 pesos per liter in Chiapas. 340,000 x .73 Pesos = 248,200 Pesos per day.
248,200 Pesos coverts to $13,992.88 USD per day.
$13,992.88 x 365 (days in a year) = $5,107,401.20 USD Total extra coke consumption.
So Coke is now possibly selling 5 million USD more dollars per year of coke with this scheme. You must subtract the cost of making coke which we do not know, and the cost of the "bribes", to find Coke's total profit here.
But as someone involved in marketing the potential downside of this scandal doesn't seem worth the extra 5 million in sales from Coke used during religious rituals in Chiapas.
It seems more likely to me that if mothers are feeding their babies Coke instead of the expensive milk, or contaminated water, that the Spiritual Healers are making the same decision as everyone else. That Coke is the safest, most cost effective and pleasant drink available.
Full Disclosure: I am drinking my morning Diet Dr. Pepper as I type this.
Now it's medicine. Now it's essential for life itself.
So you drink it at breakfast to fortify you for the day ahead. You feed gallons of it to your kids because you love them and want them to be healthy.
The high level process is: Create need (subvert the healers' credibility), make the product indispensable (attach to healing ritual), link to outcome and provide a sample (feeling better = Coke)
Most infamously, Nestle used techniques like this to sell powdered baby formula in third world countries -- a practice that literally killed thousands of children in the process. In the United States, Coke is co-branded with lots of other things that people like: McDonald's, Movies, Christmas (Santa = Coke), etc. Coke is the master of applying this marketing pattern.
But does that type of strategy extend to local communities and Spiritual Healers?
I don't think the math supports that. The team of "expert consultants" who would come up with a plan like this and institute it would charge more in their salaries than the increased consumption in Chiapas is worth. Also, ask yourself why a strategy like that would even be necessary in Chiapas???
You don't need to trick people into buying Coke when they don't have access to clean and affordable water.
So Coca Cola FEMSA's marketing people develop and execute their marketing strategy. Just because Mexico is a relatively poorer country doesn't mean that the business people are a bunch of bumpkins.
People in Chiapas may not be drinking Coke by the gallon, but it's a product with drug-like margins. They have a positive customer value, or Coke wouldn't be doing it.
What scandal? Envelopes full of cash at night by a local manager and be done. Both sides will deny it.
$5 Mil in sales is nothing, but $5 mil here and $5 mil there...Surely Coca Cola want everyone consuming their products.
So, the unsafe water, gets treated, margin added and still cheaper as coke than local drinkable water.
Not sure what to say at this.
The main ingredient in Coca-Cola is filtered water. If Coke is cheaper than water in these communities, then why isn't the company selling bottled water for the same price? Their bottling and distribution costs would be the same, while the cost of ingredients would decrease.
It makes no economic sense for Coca-Cola to not sell bottled water in this context. Lacking an economic motive, what's left? Is the assertion that Coca-Cola is actively malevolent and is using their economic power to harm people on purpose at their own expense?
If Coca-Cola is selling bottled water, then another company could come in and start selling bottled water as well, and there's really nothing interesting to differentiate them. But while another company can sell soda, they can't sell Coke. So getting people used to Coke means they'll always instinctively reach for Coke when they're thirsty.
But if something changes the water shortage, either environmental or technological, then Coca-Cola is still in a good position.
Fucking hell that's awful.
She told me when they first brought him home (he was 5), that he could barely speak, was terrified and kept screaming "oda!".
They thought perhaps Oda was the name of his brother who was sold into slavery by his birth mother.
He was unrelenting in his crys. Finally, exhausted, my cousins husband sat down at 3am and opened a Coke to drink. The boy pointed and screamed "oda!".
He wanted Soda. They gave him some and his entire nervous system relaxed and he could goto sleep.
He was raised in a drug house, spent most of his life locked in a closet with little food and plenty of feces.. and his mother bottle fed him soda.
When they adopted him he was like a feral animal, hiding and picking food out of the trash.
He's now 9 and doing much better (they had to ween him off soda). He's relaxed and is in a loving and safe home.
But fuck sakes, I don't think most of us have any idea the horror that many people are facing on a daily basis.
> We in the developed world enjoy a dream-like existence few in the whole of human history have ever known.
You just have to ask yourself; how many of my ancestors were able to afford a hot shower in the morning and you begin to realize, how mind-fuckingly amazing the life we have actually is.
Thanks for putting it into words.
That's a big reason why breastmilk companies are ready, willing and eager to "help" with sample product. Hell, somehow two of those companies were able to estimate the birthdate that our child would have likely had if my wife hadn't miscarried early. They go to the expense of mailing 10 lb boxes of product with a retail value of around $75 to people -- it's almost an "addictive" product with ROI high enough to justify that large marketing expense.
In third world countries, they go so far as to send people dressed like nurses to provide samples and "help".
I'm male, but I'm a parent and remember dealing with this stuff.
In addition to difficulty getting the baby to latch after feeding formula very early, there's also the issue of building and maintaining supply. The first few days of life are important for both mother and baby - there isn't a lot of milk being produced at first, and the child's attempts at nursing encourage milk production to begin in earnest. The natural course is that the mother's milk comes in to meet the baby's growing need. If you "skip" a day or two in the beginning, even if you get the kid to latch there isn't going to be enough milk to satisfy them. This leads to supplementing with formula, which in turn solidifies difficulty latching and further delays milk production.
I remember having to be very firm with hospital staff to under no circumstances feed our first daughter formula. In the first couple of days they really pushed us to, justifying it by saying "Momma needs her rest!" and "Dad should experience feeding the baby, too." We had a good experience overall with both our children, but in both cases I had to really take command of the situation to ensure that our wishes were followed. In a couple of cases that was even "against medical advice".
There is a lot of noise around breast feeding on the Internet but if you've got references to something other than apocryphal about formula preventing breast feeding I'm sure my daughters would like to know about it.
If your wife and daughters breastfed in the hospital or immediately thereafter and then supplemented, that is different (and lower ROI) scenario.
There’s a ton of published material on the topic.
I find your reasons hard to believe and your reference #1 proves nothing. If water is not contaminated chemically, boiling is the solution like millions of people do daily. I also find it hard to believe milk is more expensive than coke as UHT milk is easy to import in large quantities and cheap.(A fast check shows milk is half the price in Mexico, water is even cheaper). Perhaps people do it anyway, but reasons sound dubious to me.
[1] If the water is unsafe to drink, why would they not just boil it? That's how the vast majority of the world makes their water potable (especially tea).
I'm not saying Coca-Cola is free from wrongdoing, but the evidence of malice is very apocryphal. In my experiences in the third world, Coca-Cola was the only soft drink available, and people genuinely seemed to just really like soft drinks.
Heck, we have trouble getting Americans to drink water over soft drinks.
"many moms feed their babies Coke instead"
I see one reference in the article cited about two women feeding Coke to their babies. I'm not sure how the "many moms" conclusion is drawn - is there data on this or just this one anecdote?
That's the real problem in a lot of these situations and really with any long term obligation or resource grant bestowed by a government to a private entity. It doesn't necessarily reflect the will of the people in the future or, in many cases particularly in the third world, the present.
Short of restricting the maximum duration for such a grant, I don't see many ways to avoid this situation. Even that may have negative consequences as a company wouldn't want to invest in a municipality if the resources it'll be leveraging may not be available in the future. The uncertainty may make it a non starter.
Qui bono?
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by corruption. Or something like that. In situations like these (international megacorp and their offspring making deals in countries with 'emerging markets') I tend to take a very cynical view. I'm pretty sure that whoever signed those deals doesn't have to rely on these wells.
You raise some good points, though.
The government being at fault doesn't change the problem. It's a small city in rural Mexico- you can't expect much. Calling it a "severe utilities planning blunder" implies absolute agency by the local government, which just isn't always true. The government sold a local resource with the expectation that it would be safe and that may have been foolish but we can't tell from the outside in this case. Take examples of Polynesian islands being strip-converted into farmland as the inhabitants sell to corporations. The natives were one step above tribal, and had no idea that would collapse the local ecosystem, and they're now forced to import all their food. It destroyed their health and economy- that wasn't a "severe utilities planning blunder", they were directly taken advantage of.
It's pretty clear that Coca-Cola is deeply entwined with Mexican governance at all levels, so it probably doesn't even make sense to blame the government. Coke may very well be making all the choices, when former presidents of coke become presidents of the country.
> There are a lot of questions. Would things would actually get better if Coke were to shut down operations? How many people would stop drawing salaries? How much tax revenue loss does the government face with halted operations?
Those are mostly strawmen- the choice isn't binary. A Pigovian tax maximizes value to everyone. A good question is whether that would be sufficient, but I get the impression from the article that most people think it would. Since that region is the biggest water source in Mexico you'd think they have at least a little extra water.
Do you think the government acting for the people made the agreement or a government official(s) accepted bribes to make it happen. Hmmmmmmm....
No - it's how these permits are allocated -- and who pulls the strings on those making these "decisions" -- that's the crisis.
Oh of course through wealth redistribution policies. At least until that well runs dry also.
/s
So the government gave Coke the permits, Coke used under 80% of the agreed amount, and now it's a crisis? It has the markings of some severe utilities planning blunder.
> "The city has been growing significantly since the 1970s," he says in an interview at his office, which has a view of Huitepec mountain, where Coca-Cola extracts its water. "But in San Cristobal, there was no urban planning. And that's been aggravated by public policies that don't pay attention to the Indigenous people of the state."
That sort of gets at the real problem.
There are a lot of questions. Would things would actually get better if Coke were to shut down operations? How many people would stop drawing salaries? How much tax revenue loss does the government face with halted operations? Would the freed up water volume be enough to avert disaster? Does the drought affect everyday citizens or farmers the most? Are there any other environmental externalities that result from the Coke plant?
These are some of the tough questions that we need to answer before we can readily assign blame to megacorps. It's easy to hate large companies, and I dislike my fair share, but boiling this situation down into a headliner shaming corporate avarice may not be the best way to make progress. Maybe they should shut down the plant, or maybe they shouldn't--I don't know, and it shouldn't be for armchair economists thousands of miles away to decide. It just seems more complicated than the solicited visceral emotions may suggest.