To Arrowhead Water:
The Pacific Southwest Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee is canceling our water bottle deliveries from Nestlé-owned Arrowhead Water, and we would like to tell you why.
In discussions at our staff meetings, we came to see that the way in which water resources are becoming privatized is a socially irresponsible practice. Although we have received deliveries from you in 3- and 5-gallon containers, the environmental impact of the fossil-fuel-intensive transportation of your privatized water through a distribution network—and the bottling of much of it into smaller plastic containers—was also seen as socially irresponsible.
A recent article in the Los Angeles Times about citizens in Salida, Colorado trying to prevent your company from tapping an aquifer in their county showed that your company continues to aggressively privatize water resources in communities across the country. Further research on your water practices showed that you even threatened to sue Miami-Dade County for running radio ads promoting its public water supply.
Your company profile at the Responsible Shopper website points to evidence of a number of troubling practices by the Nestlé Corporation as a whole, including:
- complicity in abusive and forced child labor at cocoa farms in West Africa;
- anti-union activities, including unresolved questions about the assassination of labor leader Luciano Enrique Romero Molina, “a unionist who was tortured and murdered by paramilitaries just weeks before he was scheduled to give testimony in Switzerland about labor conditions in Nestlé’s Colombian factory”;
- distribution of tainted products in Colombia, Italy, and China even though your company had knowledge of the problems;
- continuing business dealings in Burma despite that country’s oppressive regime; and
- Nestlé’s corporate history of creating dependency on its infant formula among mothers in developing countries who don’t have adequate access to potable water.
It saddens us to say that, in many ways, your company has served as an egregious example of how corporations can be focused on maximizing private profits while shifting many of the costs onto society. In our small way, we are registering our opposition to this method of doing business by canceling our contract for water delivery from your company.
Regards,
Shan Cretin
Pacific Southwest Regional Director
American Friends Service Committee
We at Equal Exchange applaud this action by the local office of the American Friends Service Committee. But it does not surprise us either. We have been working with the AFSC around the nation for 10 years now to promote Fair Trade that supports small farmers both here in the US and around the world. Regardless, too many non-profits fail to take actions like this that ensure that their day-to-day operations align with their organization’s bigger purpose. We hope more non-profits (and civic offices, too) will follow the AFSC example.