Nestle’s Wet Dream: They Mark Up Water 53 MILLION Percent

The directors of Nestle must be breathing a sigh of relief as the world targets Monsanto with a barrage of negative publicity, global protests, and grassroots campaigns.  While we’re all distracted by Monsanto’s GMO corruption of the food supply, Nestle is taking steps to profit off of the natural world with patents on breast milk and medicinal plants, and the privatization of water,and giving the seed company a run for the title of The Most Evil Corporation in the World.

Between corporate demons like Nestle and Monsanto, the very right to life itself is becoming a commodity with a price tag as access to food and water become a privilege only available to those who have the means to pay for it.

The potential death toll would be astonishing.  Is that the point? A team effort in which the elite make money hand over fist, massive depopulation, and indentured servitude in exchange for the right to eat and drink?

Monsanto and Nestle are firmly on the same team – Nestle donated over $1 million to the campaign against GMO labeling in California and their CEO has claimed that in 15 years of consumption, no one was every harmed by eating GMOs.

While the world’s attention has been on Monsanto’s corruption of the food supply, Nestle has been quietly draining water sources around the globe and marking it up a mind-blowing 53,908,255%, while the rest of us must deal with droughts, regulations on wells and rainwater, and rising prices.

The Nestle website touts the slogan:  Good Food, Good Life is the promise we commit to, everyday, everywhere – to enhance lives, throughout life, with good food and beverages.  Somehow, it seems that mission statement must have gotten lost in the interoffice email system, because Nestle executives don’t seem to have received that message.

The Global Water Grab

Nestle has virtually taken over the water supplies in parts of South Africa, Ethiopia, and Pakistan, leaving residents of those countries to sicken and die from what remains.  Nestle has been deaf to pleas from affected villagers for access to clean water.

Perhaps that is because of theircorporate belief that water is a commodity, not a basic human right.

Natural Society’s Anthony Gucciardi wrote:

“Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.”

Gucciardi is referring to a video from 2005 that recently surfaced and went viral. In the video, Nestle’s loathsome head exec, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe had these outrageous comments about the right to water.

“Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world.  It’s a question of whether we should privatise the normal water supply for the population.  And there are two different opinions on the matter.

The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs [NGOs = Non-Government Organizations], who bang on about declaring water being a public right. That means as a human being you should have a right to water.  That’s an extreme solution.

And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.

Personally, I believe it’s better to give food stuff a value so we are all aware that it has its price and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water and there are many different possibilities there.” (source)

How benevolent of Nestle to make sure that we, the peons, realize that water has value. How rational that he believes all human beings having a right to water is “an extreme solution.”  Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, a Bilderberg group attendee, clearly has classic psychological issues.  “Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others.”

All over the world, Nestle has been draining the water from financially beleaguered regions.

The technique Nestlé uses is this: Find an economically weak region, buy up the land surrounding the water source and grease the political wheels by making a proposal the residents can’t possibly refuse. How can depressed regions resist new jobs and added local revenue? But, the revenue generated by these regions natural resource by and large goes to a corporation headquartered in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. And if the financial incentives aren’t enough to assuage concerned citizens, Nestlé’s more than happy to battle it out in court. (source)

Just so that’s clear, they find places that are already struggling with poverty.  Then, they make the poverty worse by damaging watersheds and wetlands, siphoning off hundreds of millions of gallons annually, and leaving the fields barren and dry.  This isn’t something that is just happening in Third World countries.  They’ve done it in our own backyards.  Here are just a few examples of communities pillaged by Nestle:

• Denver, Colorado
• Sacramento, California
• Fryeburg, Maine
• Mecosta, Michigan

The small Canadian town of Hillsburgh, Ontario is Nestle’s most recent target.  Nestle has permission to take 1.1 million liters of water per day from Hillsburgh’s aquifers, even during droughts.  Initially, the province had set limits on the company’s ability to withdraw that amount during drought conditions, but after “negotiations” the Ministry of the Environment capitulated to Nestle’s demands that their water pumping not be restricted.  Meanwhile, residents of the town are held to usage restrictions, as their grass turns brown and their gardens die.

The Council of Canadians, along with several regional conservation groups, has appealed the ministry’s decision to an environmental tribunal.

“We find it very troubling that the Ontario government has settled with Nestle,” Council of Canadians chair Maude Barlow said in a statement. “Ontario must prioritize communities’ right to water above a private company’s thirst for profit. Our government must think about water availability for our grand children, great grand children and beyond.”

“Under its current permit, Nestlé pays $3.71 for every million litres of water it pumps from the local watershed, which it then packages in single-use plastic bottles and sells back to the public for as much as $2 million,” the Council says.

But a Nestle spokesman told The Huffington Post Canada that the drought restrictions were only put in place due to an “administrative misunderstanding,” and mandatory rules were never the intent. (source)

Let me repeat the most important sentence in that quote.

Nestlé pays $3.71 for every million litres of water it pumps from the local watershed, which it then packages in single-use plastic bottles and sells back to the public for as much as $2 million.

$3.71 turns into $2,000,000.

A mark-up of 53,908,255%.  I checked it HERE just to make sure.

Nestle gets a free ride while water regulations abound for the rest of us.

While Nestle has free rein to tap into water supplies across the country, the rest of us are losing access to water at an exponential rate.  New laws are springing up that could tax people for the usage of well water and that disallow the collection of rainwater.   That’s right –  Nestle can take 1.1 million liters per month – but you can’t have a rain barrel in your backyard for your garden.

A  classic Agenda 21 strategy, this pretense at sustainability practices remove resources from the hands of the average person, and place the control in the hands of the elite, via large corporations who pay little to nothing in taxes.

Section II of Agenda 21, CONSERVATION AND MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPMENT, lays out the guidelines in warm and fuzzy language.  This section includes protection of the atmosphere, land, mountains, ocean and fresh waters. So basically everything in the environment of a given country.  This means that historical ways of using these resources could be outlawed, changing the basic ways of life for the indigenous people to make way for “progress” and “sustainability”.  This gives control of all natural resources to the good folks of the Division of Sustainable Development.

By specifically outlining the management of all natural resources, it disallows the use of them for any but the 1% in power, effectively keeping people from farming, fishing, mining or otherwise harvesting the innate supplies provided by their environments.

Nestle has many other appalling practices

The unsavory practices of Nestle don’t end with water.  They have spread their unethical tentacles throughout every faction of the business, despite their misleading PR campaign promoting a wholesome, community-oriented image.

Nestle wages war against breastfeeding.

Nestle is the number one producer of baby formula in the world. (Formula is an $11.5 billion dollar industry.)  The company has received sharp criticism for its inroads into third world countries, where they have created massive demand for baby formula in a place where the poverty is so intense that mere survival is a struggle.  Presented with the idea that formula was healthier for their babies than breast milk, the destitute mothers began watering down the formula and, as a result, millions of infants around the globe died of malnutrition.

Nestle’s war on breastfeeding didn’t stop there, however.  Patent US 8012509 B2 for the compounds in human breast milk was granted to Nestle in 2011.  According to a paper in the International Breastfeeding Journal in 2006, there were over 1200 patents currently pending on the components of human breast milk in the United States alone. “The ownership and monopolization of human milk components has been declared by various institutions and corporations from medical universities such as John Hopkins and Baylor College of Medicine, to infant formula companies such as Nestle and Wyeth, to biotech companies such as Agennix, and even including the US Government as represented by the Department of Health.”

Nestle is trying to patent the healing powers of the fennel flower:

In a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to “discover” what much of the world has known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for “nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy”.

But instead of creating an artificial substitute, or fighting to make sure the remedy was widely available, Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission. Nestlé has filed patent applications — which are currently pending — around the world.

Prior to Nestlé’s outlandish patent claim, researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own. And Nestlé has done this before — in 2011, it tried to claim credit for using cow’s milk as a laxative, despite the fact that such knowledge had been in Indian medical texts for a thousand years. (source)

Nestle performs cruel and unnecessary tests on animals in order to add health claims to their Nestea beverages.

• Mice bred to suffer from brain dysfunction and rapid aging were fed tea extracts and then locked in a dark chamber, where they received painful electric shocks to their feet. The mice were then killed.

• Mice bred to suffer from muscle degeneration were fed tea components, after which experimenters cut open the animals’ leg muscles and then decapitated them.

• Experimenters injected toxic chemicals into mice to destroy insulin-producing cells, causing the animals to develop diabetes. After this cruel procedure, the mice were force-fed tea extracts and then killed.

• After causing rats to suffer from high levels of fat and cholesterol in their bloodstreams, experimenters shoved tubes down the animals’ throats to force them to consume tea ingredients. The rats were then killed and dissected.

(source)

Nestle chocolate comes from slave labor, and the slaves include children.

Confectionary News reports that Nestle’s executive vice president, Jose Lopez, was asked how long the company had been using child labor. His reply was, “For as long as we’ve been using cocoa.”

But don’t worry – they promised to do better.

A report of the Washington-based civil society organisation Fair Labor Association (FLA) has shown that child labour is still widespread on Ivory Coast cocoa farms supplying Nestlé. It was the first time that a multinational chocolate producer had allowed its procurement system to be completely traced and assessed.

The study had found numerous violations of internal work rules and children’s rights. The most common tasks carried out by children on cocoa farms are filling plastic bags for nurseries, breaking up pods and transporting plants, according to the FLA. Under local law, carrying heavy loads is one of the worst forms of child labour, and the use of machetes and knives to break pods is a hazardous task. The report also found rampant injuries, mainly with machetes that slice into the children’s legs as they harvest the cocoa pods, as well as both adults and children working long hours without pay. Nestlé has announced to improve its monitoring mechanisms in its cooperatives. (source)

The Resistance Against Nestle

Much like the global resistance against Monsanto, the resistance against Nestle is rooted in alternative and social media.  The sharing of information about their unethical practices can help to take them down.

A global boycott of Nestle began in the US in 1977 in response to their aggressive marketing of baby formula, particularly in poverty-stricken Third World countries. The boycott is still active in 2013, and is administrated by the International Nestlé Boycott Committee and the UK group Baby Milk Action.

Another such movement is the website Stop Nestle Waters.  The site was created to help defend small communities against Nestle.  On their homepage, they explain why they have targeted the company:

• Because Nestle’s predatory tactics in rural communities divide small towns and pit residents against each other.

• Because Nestle reaps huge profits from the water they extract from rural communities – which are left to deal with the damage to watersheds, increases in pollution and the loss of their quiet rural lifestyle

• Because Nestle has a pattern of bludgeoning small communities and opponents with lawsuits and interfering in local elections to gain control of local water supplies.

• Because the environmental consequences of bottled water on our atmosphere, watersheds and landfills are simply too big to ignore.

This grassroots movement uses the power of social media to share information and wage war against Nestle.

Corporate Accountability International has named Nestle as a nominee in this year’s Corporate Hall of Shame, in unethical company with the likes of Monsanto, Walmart, and Bank of America.  Nestle was nominate “for undermining the human right to water and aggressively expanding water bottling operations over the objection of communities globally.”  (You can cast your vote HERE)

 Nestle’s Brands