Tsunami: A Discourse On Compassion

Like other cash crops, the pattern and organization of labor can be traced to colonial relations—for example, the Dutch smuggling of Arabica coffee out of Yemen to their colony in Java, the foundation for Indonesia’s current coffee industry; the role of French, British, Portuguese, and Japanese trading companies in Africa, Jamaica, Guyana, Brazil, and Asia, and the role of U.S. companies in Colombia, Central America, and Southeast Asia. In the present context, the colonial relationship established by World Bank structural adjustment programs in an attempt to globalize the coffee market has had a devastating impact on coffee growers, such as in Nicaragua. The privatization of coffee farms and the emphasis on cash crops for an export-driven economy led to bitter competition between Third World countries and the eventual collapse of the Association of Coffee Producing Countries, while consumption, processing, and marketing remained in the First World.  

These free market strategies, according to the World Bank’s own estimates, caused the loss of at least 600,000 jobs in Central America and left more than 700,000 people in the region near starvation; meanwhile foreign debt and loans increased. 

Coca-Cola has been at the forefront of controversies. The United Steelworkers of America, on behalf of Sinaltrainal, have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. charging Coca-Cola with complicity in the murder, torture, and intimidation of trade union organizers at Coca-Cola bottling facilities in Colombia. In India, communities around Coca- Cola’s bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages. The groundwater and soil around its bottling plants have been polluted and Coca-Cola products in the Indian market contain extremely high levels of pesticides, including DDT, sometimes higher than 30 times those allowed by U.S. or EU standards. Tests conducted by the BBC found cadmium and lead in the waste, effectively making it toxic. Coca-Cola stopped the practice of distributing its toxic waste only when ordered to do so by the state government. 

Millions of dollars of marketing cannot outweigh the increasing public resistance to the company’s practices and the unprecedented victories that have been won. Earlier this year, the Kerala High Court prevented the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada, India from drawing underground water. This order was issued because the company used so much water that the area within a radius of three kilometers has been under severe drought. The pollutants the company used caused such an unbearable stink that the water was not usable for cooking or bathing. Now, Plachimada, the largest Coca-Cola bottling plant in India, has been shut down since March 2004. 

In the state of Rajasthan, already drought-ridden, over 50 villages are experiencing water shortages as a result of Coca-Cola’s indiscriminate mining of water. “Struggle Committees” have been formed in at least 32 villages to confront Coca-Cola’s abuses. The Central Ground Water Board, a government agency, confirmed the declining water table as a result of Coca-Cola’s indiscriminate mining and also faulted Coca-Cola for creating “ecological imbalances.” 

Most recently, on November 25, 2004 in Varanasi, over 1,000 farmers and community members marched to the factory, demanding that it be shut down. (The Varanasi Coca-Cola plant draws more than 250,000 liters of underground water per day. As a result, the water level has receded from 25 to 40 feet under the ground and pollutants have rendered many acres of agricultural fields infertile.) The protest was the end of a 10-day, 250 kilometer march from Ballia, the site of another Coca-Cola bottling facility. “Drinking Coke is like drinking farmer’s blood in India,” said Nandlal Master of Lok Samiti and the National Alliance of People’s Movements, a key organizer of the march and rally. Armed police met marchers at the bottling facility and over 350 were arrested. 

It is a bitter irony that, as the media reports the danger of outbreaks of cholera and other diseases due to unsafe drinking water, one of the biggest offenders is donating bottled water to the very people who fought tooth and nail to bring this culprit to justice and who have maintained their dignity and honor in previously rejecting the company’s charitable donations of blankets, utensils, medicine, and cash. 

Meanwhile, international humanitarian and charitable organizations that have actively hindererd grassroots development and autonomy are suddenly propelled to the forefront as saviors of the Third World. 

Let us be clear, there is no doubt that humanitarian work in order to save lives and provide adequate access to food and shelter is absolutely necessary. But the larger context must never be lost. International aid and NGO work will largely defuse the anger of those affected by the tsunami—anger that again the people of the Third World are not important enough to matter; that preventative measures (such as early detection) could have been taken. The power and anger of the people has again been channeled into victimization.

Compassion has become morally and politically appropriate, as it should be. What is inexcusable is when those images of suffering are a direct consequence of policies waged by our governments and corporations for which we are culpable, we seem to exhibit compassion-deficient syndrome. A global compassion not only for human life, but for human dignity can never be attained when brown bodies swelter and slave in plantations, trying to live on two dollars a day, as thousands of farmers continue to commit suicide as their livelihoods are stolen, and women and children walk across the parched earth to confront batons and armed police guarding the gates of free market heaven.