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FACE THE FACTS
Programme 1. - Nestle and Brazilian Spa Resort
TX: 22.07.05 1230-1300
Presented by John Waite
WAITE
I'm travelling in a charrette - a horse drawn carriage in Sao Lourenco, a famous spa town about a 160 miles north west of Rio De Janeiro in Brazil. For more than a hundred years this whole region in Brazil has been known as the water circuit, it's dotted with water parks, all with natural springs with healing properties, or so it's been widely believed. But this Sao Lourenco is the most famous - here presidents, royalty, as well as thousands of commoners have come to take the natural mineral waters. But what's been happening to its waters over the last few years has put a question mark over the future of Sao Lourenco.
And the problem is here, because we've stopped in front of a giant factory, it's owned by Nestle and they've begun pumping operations here which are taking millions and millions and litres of these natural waters and bottling them for sale.
Walking up to the factory gates it looks like almost an industrial fortress. There's a huge perimeter wall right the way round, about 15 foot tall, and beyond it giant aluminium tanks in which the water that's pumped here is stored.
FREDERICK
What has been happening here it's a real threat to the whole region. They have illegally de-mineralised the water, they have pumped far too much water, they've brought a huge environmental damage to the whole area. And it's not a Brazilian issue, it's a planetary issue. But it's a powerful example of the future ahead of us.
WAITE
Franklin Frederick is a campaigner against what's been happening in Sao Lourenco. His concerns echoed by groups around the world, who are critical of the impact that multinationals have in exploiting water sources in developing countries, and then selling the products back to the inhabitants of those countries or exporting them abroad. With high profit margins, bottled water has been dubbed "liquid gold" by business analysts. And the global leader in this modern klondike is Swiss based Nestle - with products from its 67 bottling factories selling in more than 130 countries and boosting the company's multibillion pound turnover.
According to Nils Rosemann - a lawyer and human rights consultant based in Islamabad - Nestle invented a blueprint factory whose design could be shipped virtually anywhere and assembled ready to start production. And with its identikit factory came an identikit brand - Pure Life, launched in 1998 and which began life in Pakistan.
ROSEMANN
Well they choose Pakistan because in Pakistan they had local knowledge, they were already present, Pakistan has a quite good infrastructure for travellers like transport, highways, you have China, you have India, you have Thailand - you just go over the ocean and you are in the Emirates in Saudi Arabia. And these are the countries of the main need of bottled water. And of course Pakistan is the only country in the region that has an unregulated groundwater sector. Whoever is able to dig a hole in the ground or a well he can or she can extract as much water as they want without paying anything.
WAITE
Within six months, Pure Life captured more than half the market in Pakistan. And went on to be produced throughout Asia, Africa and South America. Where the impact of its production in Sao Lourenco has been closely monitored by Franklin Fredrick, a member of the National Health Council of Brazil's working party on mineral water.
FREDERICK
Pure Life is not just a bottled water, it's a concept. And the concept - the idea behind it is that countries such as India or Brazil they don't have a good quality of tap water.
WAITE
So what is the water then?
FREDERICK
It is purified water, it must be the same be it produced in India or in Africa or in Brazil. So they take mineral water, they de-mineralise it, they clean it and they put the same amount of minerals afterwards - it's a standard production, it tastes the same all over the world.
WAITE
A standardising process that Nestle introduced to Sao Lourenco's mineral water supplies in 1999 when a small bottling plant it owned at the edge of the town's famous water park was damaged by floods, and the company took the opportunity whilst repairing the damage to redevelop the whole site. Turning what had been a small operation into a sizeable production centre. But if locals were worried they had no need to be - at least according to the company's promotional blurb:
PROMOTIONAL STATEMENT While at first sight there would seem to be enough water on our blue planet, in fact barely 1% of the world's water is available for human and environmental needs. As the world leader in bottled waters Nestle has a responsibility towards the sustainable use of water resources. We consult with local communities on water issues.
Brazil, amazingly, contains almost 17% of all the world's underground reserves of fresh water. And this entire region - the Minas Gerais - is covered with natural springs and spa resorts. Reserves that the powerful new pumps at Nestle's plant in the water park at Sao Lourenco have been busy exploiting, much to the concern of local hydrologist Dr Gabriel Junqueira.
JUNQUEIRA THROUGH TRANSLATOR
I fear that a lot of the damage is irreversible for the springs that are coming from 30-40 metres depth, the aquifer has water at different levels, water that's been in there for centuries, it's picked up different mineral characteristics. And the water that's coming up to these springs that you see around is coming from different levels. And this is something that's unique, I don't even know if you have something like this in the UK or Europe, we've got 11 different springs, each with different characteristics. This is a wonder for Brazil but for the world as well.
WAITE
Other residents too, like Luciana Lee, were taken by surprise when the owners of the park, Nestle, began greatly expanding their local operation there, and surrounding the new complex with a high concrete wall.
LEE
The factory it grew in silence. They started just building and it became a huge factory.
WAITE
What did local people make of it?
LEE
We started shouting, we did some acts - sending e-mails to everybody but nothing worked. I couldn't understand how they built this enormous plant, it's very huge and on top of this sanctuary.
SINGING
WAITE
The water park itself is a very beautiful place, with its groves and glades, a couple of small lakes for boating or fishing and sound effects provided by waterfowl and monkeys. On the day of my visit, with campaigner Franklin Frederick, families are out in force. In one corner, local choirs are singing, in another, actors performing a play. And there's a rather special setting for a young violin player.
FREDERICK
This is an open air theatre and as you see these huge bamboos, this is called the Bamboo Cathedral.
WAITE
Well this is really the most amazing sight, it's a huge arching canopy of bamboos. And the bamboos rise a hundred feet into the air and curve as they do, so surrounded in this natural amphitheatre they form a natural roofed arch.
VIOLIN PLAYING
Anxious to safeguard their town's unique asset, locals like hydro-geologist Dr Junqueira decided to take a closer look at Nestle's activities there. And discovered that although the company had applied for a licence to de-mineralise the spring waters it was taking from the aquifer, the natural underground reservoir below the water park, permission had been refused, nevertheless Nestle had gone ahead anyway. It had also in expanding its factory built a new perimeter wall, extending seven metres into the ground without the proper clearance required by federal law.
JUNQUEIRA THROUGH TRANSLATOR
This is a very vulnerable area, there should even be regulations about how many people are allowed to walk here but they've constructed this factory and wall and there's the parking for the vehicles that are there. The wall that they've constructed, it goes very deep and itself is disturbing the aquifer.
WAITE
Nestle says the foundations of the wall are not deep enough to have any impact on the aquifer. But according to the locals Nestle's pumping activities certainly are. Pumping that was taking out more than half a million litres a day and which residents maintain has seriously affected the town's most precious asset - its therapeutic springs. Luciana Lee:
LEE
All these waters they used to taste differently, one for each ailment, and now they taste all the same. They took away the good water ...
WAITE
The groundwater.
LEE
Yeah the groundwater. So I don't like to come here anymore, I really don't.
WAITE
Around the park are treatment rooms, places to bathe or have a massage, you can even sniff the natural gas or have an outdoor shower in mineral water. But most people simply drink it from the series of natural springs that are dotted around, each of them housed in its own individual terracotta roofed pavilion.
You take the waters with - well it's rather like a sort of telescopic cup, it flips out and becomes a plastic cup. You go up to the spring, the iron spring, fill up your cup and take the waters. Tastes pretty unremarkable to me, I can't detect anything ferrous about it and the locals too say that is because the water has been affected.
LEE
I came to live here looking for some peace and quiet and I had asthma and it was a good place with those healing waters and we used to have a fountain, sulphur fountain, with those gases that you inhale and they're good for asthma, for sinus problems, it's gone too - no gas anymore
WAITE
Did you feel it was helping with your asthma?
LEE
It used to be good because I used to run here, I was a runner, and afterwards I'd drink the water and inhale the gases, it was real good.
WAITE
But something seemed to have happened that had changed the park's natural springs and gas outlets also struck Paulino De Souza, a prominent lawyer based in Rio de Janeiro who's bought a retirement home in the area.
DE SOUZA
When I first came to San Lourenco every fountain has a taste different from the others and we had gas - natural gas. I remember my granddaughters with me smelling some gas and saying for me - what a bad thing. And now the gas no more exists.
WAITE
Well this is the Fonte Sulphura - the sulphur well - and there's a little pipe with a nozzle on the top and through this pipe, apparently, the natural sulphur used to bubble. Put your hand over the nozzle and you wait for the sulphur gases to build up under your thumb, give it a few seconds, I'm going to put my nose down towards it, quickly over the top, breathe in, so the gas can get into your lungs, but there's no gas - he's right - to get in there.
And with 70 hotels and guest houses, these changes have not gone unnoticed by visitors to Sao Lourenco and they're the lifeblood of the town, according to Flavio Valente, head of Brazil's "Human Right to Water" project.
VALENTE
You see that the town lived out of the water and the park, everybody lived out of the water - it's a very small town and where most of the people live from the commercial events that go around the fact that people go there to treat themselves and to rest and to drink the waters because they think the waters are medicinal, they have medicinal capacities or had.
WAITE
The residents had had enough and in 2001, helped by the lawyer in their ranks, Paulino De Souza, decided to challenge Nestle in the courts.
DE SOUZA
We began to explore and to investigate about those things and we began to make some demonstrations against Nestle and the lack of dialogue from Nestle with the population.
WAITE
It was only after Nestle's new wells had been sunk and work was underway on the new wall and factory extension that the company's environmental impact assessment for the plant was completed. And it didn't make for good reading for their local opponents.
JUNQUEIRA THROUGH TRANSLATOR
Okay, this is the map from Nestle's own impact assessment report, it's in three colours. There's blue, which is not so vulnerable, pink, which is more vulnerable and this deep red here, which is maximum vulnerability. This is a city of Sao Lourenco, here's the river and you can see here this is the wall going around the water park, which is covering the area of maximum vulnerability - the red colour, the deep red - and this here, right in the middle of the deep red area, is Nestle's factory with dotted around it these springs which we're trying to protect.
WAITE
So the very area, which is the most vulnerable, is the very area that's been chosen for the plant.
JUNQUEIRA THROUGH TRANSLATOR
That's exactly correct.
WAITE
Two hundred miles away, in the country's capital, Brasilia, Flavio Valente heads a project which reports on the issues of water rights to his government and the UN. And he also had been looking into events in Sao Lourenco.
VALENTE
The studies that have been done by specialists show that the water in the different sources, water sources, has changed over the last few years. That also shows that something is going on underneath in the soil. Why? Because you pumped out so much water that the pressures in the systems they have a loss of soil, the special combination of minerals that was present in that water before is not there anymore either.
WAITE
After a petition was signed by more than 3,000 residents, the court case to close the factory went ahead. Pedro Paulo Aina is Sao Lourenco's public prosecutor.
AINA THROUGH TRANSLATOR
We begin an inquiry to find the facts and after about seven months of investigation we came to the conclusion that there were two principle and fundamental problems. The illegal nature of the exploitation of the Primavera Spring and the over-exploitation of the mineral water aquifer. The excessive exploitation is dangerous not only for tourism and the whole city lives on tourism but also in the sense that it puts at risk a gift of nature that is not just Sao Lourenco's but of all humanity.
WAITE
The court ordered the bottling plant to close. Which it duly did - but only for a matter of days. Nestle appealed the decision and the ruling to shut the entire factory was annulled pending a final judgement in the case, which four years on is still awaited. But the company stopped de-mineralising the local water to make its Pure Life brand. Pumping hasn't ended, however, because Nestle continues to extract carbon dioxide from the waters. And while pumping continues, the locals say, so does the environmental damage. Including to the land on which the park is built. I saw for myself how cracks have appeared along the walls and the floor tiles of the pavilion housing the iron springs, the Fonte Ferruginosa. And at the nearby Magnesiano Spring Pavilion.
FREDERICK
The groundwater is sinking, so the surface - the soil - is sinking together.
WAITE
Well the crack outside this pavilion is really quite large, I mean I can look down into it, it's got to be at least four or five centimetres wide.
FREDERICK
Exactly, because if you take out the water you create free space. So it's a void. That's why in the former times pumping was not allowed.
WAITE
Nestle say the cracks are due to the natural movement of the ground and that following a bad flood the land had been saturated and has been settling. The chief concern of the people we met in Sao Lourenco, however, remained whether the characteristics of its therapeutic waters had indeed somehow been altered. Nestle told us that the question of taste was ultimately subjective but there was no scientific evidence or official report confirming any change in taste, composition or in the healing effect of the springs. Hydro-geologic systems, it pointed out, are dynamic, not static, and mineral waters can be naturally subject to small variations in levels of mineral elements. How much of a variation we tried to test for ourselves.
Well this is the Fonte Ferruginosa, the Ferris Spring, the Ferris Fountain, and what I'm going to do I'm going to take samples of some of these waters to see whether they - this has supposedly got 360 milligrams of ferrous content in it - to see how the figures stack up. Take the top off.
Samples we duly had analyzed in the laboratories of a major water company. Comparing them with official mineral contents tables from 2001 and 2004 and which already showed a decline in the presence of things like iron and magnesium. And our results did indeed appear to indicate that that decline was continuing.
The concerns over local water supplies being exploited by multinationals are shared by many people in Brazil, not just those in Sao Lourenco. When 35,000 complaints were received by the National Council of Brazilian Bishops the churches decided to launch a campaign to protect the country's waters from privatisation. Its executive secretary is Father Martino Lenz [phon.]
LENZ
This campaign is being done together with some other churches because water is such an important issue, it's not a merchandise, it's the source of life, water is the source of life. There are many, many other areas in which private business can work and get their money but not in these fundamental questions like water and environment, has to be preserved. Our preoccupation is that if this happened in Sao Lourenco it just may happen in many other places.
WAITE
And it appears it has. Five thousand miles north of Brazil, in the Great Lakes region of the United States, locals having been fighting a similar battle. If Brazil has 17% of all the world's underground reserves of fresh water, the Great Lakes area accounts for 20% of all the world's surface fresh water. And Sanctuary Springs in the heart of Michigan is - like Sao Lourenco - an ancient water source and amenity in an historic and beautiful setting.
SWIER
It is a wildlife preserve where approximately 800 deer. I have children and grandchildren and we have all enjoyed all of the waters here in Michigan, for fishing, for canoeing and just for the beauty, we have so much to be thankful for when we have all of this water in Michigan.
WAITE
So when five years ago locals, like Terry Swier, heard that Nestle proposed to build a factory to draw hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer, that supplies the sanctuary stream, just as in Brazil, she and others objected.
SWIER
We went to a presentation that Nestle gave where they explained what they were going to do and how many gallons per minute they were going to be taking. None of us are scientists but common sense told us there's going to be a problem here. The plant manager stood up in front of all of us with a big grin on his face and said - We will not come where we're not wanted. I think that at the very beginning the citizens in the area said - You are not wanted here.
WAITE
And the 1800 people who formed a group calling itself Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation invited attorney Jim Olson to offer his legal expertise.
OLSON
It didn't ring right with them, what Nestle was saying. They knew their lakes, they knew their stream, they knew the marsh and it didn't make sense that Nestle would be pulling out what they were proposing at that point was three or four hundred million gallons a year. Knowing their system they didn't believe that this wouldn't have an impact.
WAITE
And when an approach to the local town council failed to halt the plant's operations in autumn 2003 the Michigan citizens took their protest to court. The judge himself travelled the disputed waterway in a canoe and again, as in Sao Lourenco, the initial court ruling seemed a victory for the objectors.
OLSON
The judge ultimately in the case shut down the well and concluded that there was no property right or legal right or water right for a company to extract water in a fashion that would diminish the flow or reduce the level of any lake, stream or wetland.
WAITE
However again, just as in Brazil, the victory was short-lived, Nestle appealed and the plant, like the one in Sao Lourenco, was allowed to continue pumping until a final verdict was reached. A verdict that's still awaited. Nestle have once again stressed to us that their use of groundwater has not caused any damage. However, according to the locals, the impact of Nestle's activities on Sanctuary Springs has been what they always feared.
SWIER
Well here we are, we're standing on the dead stream and we're seeing the damage that has been done and to me it will never come back. The water, the beauty, the animals, everything that's here, was absolutely gorgeous and the stream that flowed, which you don't see it flowing right now, it's heartbreaking.
WAITE
But the company told us that two years of field observation showed no adverse effects. Surface water levels, Nestle says, are fully consistent with those before the arrival of the new plant. After, what they call, differing precipitation amounts and other variables are taken into consideration. Jim Olson remains unconvinced.
OLSON
As we sit today there are places in this stream where Nestle is pumping where there is a trickle of water where there used to be a foot or more of water flowing. That is dramatic. And Nestle says well our pumping isn't causing that it's just low rainfall and it's true we've had in that area of the state 70% of the normal rainfall but you can look back in time when there has been those same periodic seasonal droughts - there's always been water in the stream. I mean anybody could look at that and say hey even if we're not causing it I'm certainly not going to take water out of a stream that's in this condition, it's not ethical.
WAITE
In a detailed response from Nestle to the concerns we've heard about today the company points out that in countries where markets are developing regulatory frameworks are not always clear cut and operating a business can be a challenge.
NESTLE STATEMENT A key element of Nestle's business principles is that our business should not sacrifice long term development for short term profit. Socially responsible and sustainable business practices are not an add on, they're an essential component of our long term strategy. All of Nestle's facilities at Sao Lourenco have the appropriate and necessary permissions and the regulators have been clear in confirming that the facility was managed within the law and in an environmentally sustainable manner. Nestle manages the water park. The funds raised through the price of admission are entirely reinvested in the park's maintenance, it would be self-defeating and bad business to deplete a water source in which significant funds have been invested.
For the residents in both the communities we visited however the battle goes on. In Minas Gerais just as in Michigan with its new neighbour Nestle.
SWIER
I look at it and I say this is worth fighting because this is my legacy to my family, to my - to my children and my grandchildren is that why should some corporation have the right to come in here for the privatisation of our water? It just does not make sense to me and I know that we're right and the David and Goliath battle - I will fight it till the very end. |
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