By IPS Correspondents
SAN SALVADOR, Jan 30 2003 (IPS)

The El Salvador subsidiary of Coca Cola is accused of hogging scarce water supplies in a region where the rivers that have not dried up or totally disappeared under urban areas are polluted.

But the soft drink company maintains that it is living up to international environmental standards.

The Embotelladora Salvadoreña (Embosalva), a bottling company that belongs to the Agrisal consortium, invested 23 million dollars three years ago to build Nixtapa, its second plant, in the northern municipality of Nejapa, on top of important underground aquifers.

But the firm, whose 120 employees bottle 100,000 crates of Coca Cola and other soft drinks a day, moved to that site after exhausting the water sources in Soyapango, where it began to operate its first bottling company in 1979, said the director of the Appropriate Technology Research Centre, Ricardo Navarro.

In the municipalities of Soyapango, Ilopango and San Marcos, piped water is available only eight hours a day and water quality is poor, posing health risks to the local population – a situation that fuels the growth of the market for bottled water, stated the Human Development Report 2001 of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Some 350,000 residents of Soyapango depend on water from the Nejapa underground reserves, because the nearby rivers are polluted, have dried up, or have simply disappeared under the urban sprawl.

Navarro lamented that the authorities do not have the resources needed to measure and monitor the amount of water extracted by the company. ”First it is necessary to guarantee that the people have water. Coca-Cola, as a beverage, is not more important,” said the environmentalist.

El Salvador’s laws do not require companies to pay taxes or compensation for the use of water resources.

Environmentalists accuse transnational soft drink producers of contributing to the global water crisis. In two or three decades, there will not be enough water on the planet to meet the needs of humanity – a looming catastrophe to which at least 10 transnational corporations (including Coca Cola) contribute, say Canadian activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke in their book ‘Blue Gold’.

But Embosalva points out that it was granted the ISO 14001 certification last year, which ensures that a company is complying with international environmental standards.

The company built a liquid waste disposal plant at a cost of 1.5 million dollars. ”We are concerned about preserving natural resources. We are the first Salvadoran company and the first Coca Cola bottling plant of the Northern division, which stretches from Mexico to Colombia and the Caribbean, to receive ISO 14001 certification,” said José Carlos Bonilla, president of Embosalva.

Bonilla said the company’s environmentally responsible policy includes reforestation programmes, a greenhouse that hands out saplings during ”Mission Planet” campaigns, and the sponsorship of community clean-up campaigns in which plastic waste products are collected.

* Tierramérica is a specialised news service (www.tierramerica.net) produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.

Excerpt: