Nestle Continues Stealing World’s
Water During
Drought
Nestlé is draining California aquifers,
from Sacramento alone taking 80 million
gallons annually. Nestlé then sells the people's
water back to them at great profit under many
dozen brand names.
The Arrowhead Mountain Water Company
bottling plant, owned by
Swiss conglomerate Nestle, on the Morongo Indian
Reservation near Cabazon,
Calif. Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP.
The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a
record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation
continues to bottle city water to sell back to the
public at a big profit, local activists charge.
The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in
Sacramento is the target of a major press
conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a
water coalition that claims the company
is draining up to 80 million gallons
of water a year from Sacramento aquifers
during the drought.
The coalition, the crunchnestle alliance,
says that City Hall has made this use of
the water supply possible through a
“corporate welfare giveaway,” according
to a press advisory.
A coalition of environmentalists,
Native Americans and other concerned
people announced the press conference
will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new
Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.
The coalition will release details of a
protest on Friday, March 20, at the South
Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to
“shut down” the facility. The coalition is
calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate
with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close
down.
“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually
unlimited use of water – up to 80 million
gallons a year drawn from local aquifers –
while Sacramentans (like other Californians)
who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total
water used in the State of California, have
had severe restrictions and limitations forced
upon them,” according to the coalition.
“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons
it pumps out of the ground – the same
rate as an average residential water user. But
the company can turn the area’s water
around, and sell it back to Sacramento at
mammoth profits,” the coalition said.
Activists say that Sacramento officials
have refused attempts to obtain details
of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members
have addressed the Sacramento City Council
and requested that Nestle’ either pay a
commercial rate under a two tier level,
or pay a tax on their profit.
Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek
Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif.
Photo credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
In October, the coalition released a
“White Paper” highlighting predatory water
profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water
Bottling Company in various cities, counties,
states and countries. Most of those great
“deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at
the expense of citizens and taxpayers.
Additionally, the environmental impact on
many of those areas yielded disastrous results.
Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said,
“This corporate welfare giveaway is an
outrage and warrants a major investigation.
For more than five months we have
requested data on Nestlé water use. City
Hall has not complied with our request,
or given any indication that it will.
Sacramentans deserve to know how
their money is being spent and what
they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re
getting ripped off.”
For more information about the
crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn
(530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) gmail.com
or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251
Nestlé is currently the leading supplier
of the world’s bottled water, including
such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino,
and has been criticized by activists for
human rights violations throughout the
world. For example, Food and Water
Watch and other organizations blasted
Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment”
in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”
“The failure to examine Nestlé’s track
record on the human right to water is
not surprising given recent statements
by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging
the human right to water,” said
Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director
of Food & Water Watch. She noted
that the company famously declared at
the 2000 World Water Forum in the
Netherlands that water should be defined
as a need—not as a human right.
“In November 2013, Colombian trade
unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became
the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated
by a paramilitary organization while many
of his fellow workers were in the midst of a
hunger strike protesting the corporation’s
refusal to hear their grievances,” according
to the groups.
The press conference and protest will
take place just days after Jay Famiglietti,
the senior water scientist at the NASA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech
and a professor of Earth system science at
UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the
LA Times on March 12 that California
has only one year of water supply left
in its reservoirs.
“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple
fact is that California is running out of
water — and the problem started before
our current drought. NASA data reveal that
total water storage in California has been in
steady decline since at least 2002,
when satellite-based monitoring began,
although groundwater depletion has been
going on since the early 20th century.
Right now the state has only about one
year of water supply left in its reservoirs,
and our strategic backup supply,
groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.
California has no contingency plan for a
persistent drought like this one
(let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought),
except, apparently, staying in emergency
mode and praying for rain.”
Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues
(**to sit w/ his thumb up his butt ignoring the problem)
to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan
(BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels
to ship Sacramento River water to corporate
agribusiness, Southern California water
agencies, and oil companies conducting
fracking operations. The $67 billion plan
won’t create one single drop of new water,
but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm l
and out of production under the guise of
“habitat restoration” in order to irrigate
drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate
mega-growers on the west side of the
San Joaquin Valley.
The tunnel plan will also hasten the
extinction of Sacramento River Chinook
salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and
longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish
species, as well as imperil the salmon and
steelhead populations on the Klamath and
Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels
will be good for agribusiness, water privateers,
oil companies and the 1 percent, but will
be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and
environment of California and the public trust.
The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!
In fact, the endangered Delta smelt,
once the most abundant fish in the entire
Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct,
according to UC Davis fish biologist and
author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital
Public Radio.
“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta
Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists
with the Delta Stewardship Council.
According to Capital Public Radio:
“He says the latest state trawl survey found
very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-
San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.
‘That trawl survey came up with just
six smelt, four females and two males,’ s
ays Moyle. “Normally because they can target
smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’
Moyle says the population of Delta smelt
has been declining for the last 30 years
but the drought may have pushed the
species to the point of no return. If the
smelt is officially declared extinct, which
could take several years, the declaration
could change how water is managed in California.
‘All these biological opinions on Delta
smelt that have restricted some of the
pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle.
But Moyle says pumping water from
the Delta to Central and Southern California
could still be restricted at certain times
because of all the other threatened fish
populations.”
The Delta smelt, an indicator species
that demonstrates the health of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta,
reached a new record low population
level in 2014, according to the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall
midwater trawl survey that was released
in January.
Department staff found a total of only
eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled
each month from September through December
The smelt is considered an indicator species
because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is
endemic to the estuary and spends all
of its life in the Delta.
The California Department of Fish
and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted
the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey
(FMWT) to index the fall abundance
of pelagic (open water) fish, including
Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin
smelt, threadfin shad and American
shad, nearly annually since 1967.
The index of each species is a number
that indicates a relative population
abundance.
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