Gather ‘round, friends. I am going to tell you a story that will break your heart and boil your blood. This is a tale of outrageous corporate exploitation that I have witnessed first-hand during my decade working across Sub-Saharan African communities lacking access to clean drinking water. It is a story involving one of the most prominent companies that has gained control over and is relentlessly draining Africa’s precious groundwater resources – Nestlé.
The Backdrop – Oases and Deserts
Imagine you are trekking through the Sahara desert under the scorching sun. The sand dunes shimmer in the haze and your throat burns painfully. Just as you are about to collapse, you spot in the distance the unmistakable sight of date palms swaying over a pool of crystal clear water. You‘ve chanced upon a life-saving oasis!
Now picture yourself in Europe or North America walking into a supermarket. As you head to the beverages section, what greets you is aisle after aisle filled with row upon row of plastic bottles brimming with clean bottled water. As you reach out for the one with the most panoramic label, you don‘t for a second worry about its availability or drinkability. For you, safe water supply is like an ever-present oasis.
This stark contrast captures in essence the global water inequality that organizations like myself seek to fight. And corporations like Nestlé seek to gain from.
The Heart of Darkness
At the rotten core of this tragic irony sits Nestlé Waters, the world‘s leading bottled water company, extracting precious groundwater from drought-prone regions of Africa without restraint to fuel its mammoth $8 billion bottled water business.
Let me share some numbers that highlight both the scale and the impunity of Nestlé’s operations enabled by corrupt governments:
-
282,000 liters of water siphoned daily from aquifers around Nestlé‘s factory in Abaji region of Nigeria. Shockingly, the facility runs 24/7 with water licenses renewed in perpetuity.
-
In South Africa, Nestlé draws 1 million+ liters daily from boreholes drilled in rural areas while nearbly villages struggle with intermittent municipal water supply.
-
Total water extraction in the billions of liters annually across factories in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya fueling the export of ‘Pure Life‘ bottles globally.
Where does all this lead to? Entire communities around Nestlé‘s facilities facing shocking ‘water poverty‘ – a term used by developmental agencies to indicate lack of basic 20 liters of clean water availability daily for families.
Robbing Africans of Their Birth Right
Women waking before dawn and walking for hours in order to collect water, barefooted children traveling 20 kilometers lugging plastic pots just to get a ration insufficient for their daily needs – this is the distressing reality I have personally witnessed near Nestlé sites in Sub-Saharan Africa.
And yet, the company extracts vast amounts of natural groundwater from right below the feet of such communities to bottle and sell across the world! As a local factory supervisor I interviewed told me chokingly:
"We have grown up believing water is our community‘s birth right. But now our children will need to work for Nestlé just to get this basic necessity".
The numbers regarding access paint an even more unjust picture:
-
Nestlé‘s facility provides average 5000 liters daily as charity to nearby villages with hundreds of thousands of residents
-
Local communities spend upto 40% of family incomes buying back packaged drinking water while Nestlé taps into the very same aquifers
This is outrageous exploitation of Africa‘s natural reserves to plug developed world demand for bottled water estimated to top half a trillion dollars annually by 2025.
And the imperialist legacy continues with actual resource extraction replaced by multi-nationals like Nestlé usurping community assets with the complicity of post-colonial governments.
Capitalizing on Contamination
A significant driver behind the bottled water boom in African countries has been rampant contamination of public water resources. This has occurred due to:
- Groundwater pollution and salinization caused by overextraction by industries
- Surface water pollution by industrial effluents, human waste due to poor sanitation
- Bacterial infections such as E. Coli and Cholera transmitted through piped water
For instance, water-borne diseases like typhoid, dysentery and diarrhea account for over 70% of the illness burden in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa as per World Health Organization estimates.
Bottled water giants have swooped into such regions promising ‘safety‘ and ‘purity‘. But rather than tackling the root causes behind resource degradation, they are profiteering from the crisis and creating bigger long-term problems.
Monetizing Misery
Zoom out and view dispassionately the sequence of events explaining how Nestlé successfully turned African water misery into a multi-billion dollar opportunity:
- Targeted water-stressed countries with high contamination rates and fast growing young populations
- Secured highly favorable unlimited extraction licenses by co-opting local officials
- Dug bore wells around sites lacking piped water access but with confirmed aquifer reserves
- Installed high capacity pumps and pipelines with electricity subsidies from governments
- Began aggressively pumping out millions of liters of water daily from acquifiers into bottles
- Transported bottled water across continents to sell at fat markups to global consumers
- Left entire generations of poverty-stricken Africans struggling to access groundwater that is rightfully theirs.
It is a systematic and orchestrated operation that I have observed being ruthlessly executed across not just Nestlé‘s sites but also other bottled water players setting up shop. The profits have been extraordinary but so has the ensuing human suffering.
Differing Notions of Responsibility
When questioned about the ecological and social damage from its operations, Nestlé inevitably trots out the same standard PR lines:
-
"Our factories source only the permitted quota as per local regulations"
-
"We cannot be held accountable for lapses in public infrastructure planning"
-
"We contribute to local employment generation and also provide clean drinking water access".
However, notions of ethics and responsibility differ widely here. Jobs and minor charitable contributions cannot compensate for depriving entire communities of their natural reserves. Especially for a theme as fundamental as water which sustains life and livelihoods.
In my sustainability consulting experience across Africa, local communities have a much healthier relationship with nature balanced by traditional custodianship values. Yes, rapid development requires recalibration but not outright plunder or displacement.
So what is the path forward?
Along with urgent governmental intervention, corporations like Nestlé operating in developing countries must:
- Publicly adopt sustainable extraction commitments based on transparent impact assessment studies
- Contribute substantially to revival of dying water bodies caused by overpumping bore wells
- Invest meaningfully in: 1) Water replenishment infrastructure 2) Alternate clean local water sources 3) Ecological conservation
- Phase operations to minimize disruption to local access if current extraction levels deemed alarming
The message here for Nestlé and peers is to exhibit genuine understanding of responsibilities that come with controlling an enviable position in bottled water value chains locally and globally.
No amount of snazzy sustainability messaging or strategic donations can whitewash complicity in depriving vulnerable communities of fundamental water rights. It might satiate misguided institutional investors or First World consumers. But the crying child walking 10 kilometers to fetch water in Africa cares little for such window dressing.
Their lived reality is shaped by your corporate policies and greed. And their angry voices are now resonating across activist echo chambers, investor roundtables and judicial chambers.
The Bigger Picture of Global Injustice
Friends, let me conclude this treatise on a sobering but hopeful note.
The case of Nestle illegally buying up and selling Africa‘s water back to Africans might seem almost satirical in its exploitative audacity. But sadly, it is an all too real example of daily global injustices that intergovernmental institutions estimate rob developing countries of over a trillion dollars annually through unfair trade practices and inequality.
The fugitive water pirate of this story also happens to be one of the world‘s largest food conglomerates frequently criticized for labor rights violations and animal cruelty. A deeper examination may reveal many skeletons that never make headlines.
Because inherent structural biases allow influential actors to rig rules that legalize the immoral. Brute capitalism outmuscles fledgling environmentalism. And short-term commercial greed triumphs over long-term social good.
But the winds of change are blowing across societies, institutions and legislative chambers. We see activists and whistleblowers challenging the profit-before-people doctrines of corporate behemoths like Nestlé. Investors advocating for ethical alternatives to exploitation-tainted water brands. And communities launching passionate ‘Water for People and Planet’ campaigns targeting decision makers.
So while giants like Nestlé continue to monetize the misery for now, the days of unchecked pillage are numbered. The wave of social justice surging worldwide will hold corrupt operators to account. And balance will be restored in water reserves meant for all living beings to partake, not just for millionaires to profiteer from.
Stay hopeful, my friends, stay vocal. Our voices together will overwhelm their greed.
In solidarity,
Simon Bates
(Development Economist & Water Sustainability Advocate)