HEALTH: Indians Rediscover Fruit Juice after Cola Controversy

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 28 2003 (IPS) - While Coca-Cola and Pepsi are bogged down in a losing publicity battle over pesticide residues in their bottled products, Indians are rediscovering the value of fruit juices and natural thirst quenchers that are abundantly available in this farming country.

Ever since the U.S. colas began flooding the markets as the most visible part of India’s decade-old economic liberalisation process, nutritionists have agonised over the dangers posed by ”empty calories” in softdrinks to India’s billion-plus people, more than half of whom are reckoned to be suffering from some degree of malnutrition.

According to the ‘2020 Global Food Outlook: Trends, Alternatives, Choices’ report released this week by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), by 2020 one third of the world’s malnourished children will be living in India.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has estimated that malnutrition may be costing the Indian economy anywhere between 10 billion and 28 billion U.S. dollars annually in terms of lost productivity, illnesses and death.

But pushed by relentless advertising campaigns involving India’s top film stars and sports personalities mouthing catchy lines on television and other media, both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have been steadily notching up sales to well over six million bottles annually.

It is amid such a scenario that the New Delhi-based environmental group Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) sprung on an unsuspecting public on Aug. 5 the discovery by its laboratories that most softdrinks sold in India, including Pepsi and Coca Cola, were contaminated with large doses of commonly available pesticides.

Among these pesticides are Lindane, DDT, Chlorpyrifos and Malathion.

Vandana Shiva, internationally known campaigner for chemical-free organic agriculture and ‘people’s food rights and food sovereignty’, said that from the point of view of nutrition colas were already bad but colas laced with pesticides were ”doubly bad”.

Shiva, who runs the return-to-basics ‘Navdanya’ movement, which promotes traditional Indian thirst quenchers, said the pesticides controversy would not have risen in the first place if people had stuck to sustainable, organic farming.

Leading nutritionists have opined that the softdrink controversy may have not only served to sensitise people to the serious problem of pesticides contaminating drinking water and the environment, but to issues like ”empty calories” and the ”chip-and-cola” diet that are relatively new to this country.

”Nutrition awareness is generally low in this country and there is a need for the right kind of knowledge on the value of fresh fruit and vegetables to reach people who may be easily swayed by advertisement campaigns,” said Santosh Jain Passi, reader in nutrition at the prestigious Institute of Home Economics at Delhi University.

Passi told IPS in an interview that what was important to note was that ignorance concerning the right type of diets may affect the well-to-do just as easily as poor and illiterate people.

”Broadly speaking, for all groups, money spent on softdrinks is better utilised on fresh fruit or fruit juices because they carry the benefits of valuable micronutrients, bio-active compounds and phyto-chemicals,” Passi added.

Most nutritionists say while there was nothing wrong with an occasional cola or the pizzas and burgers packaged alongside it at fast food outlets, excessive and habitual consumption of such items in place of age-old dietary practices are bound to have a negative impact in terms of early incidence of chronic degenerative diseases.

But following the ‘pesticides-in cola’ controversy, fastfood outlets have begun advertising their burgers and pizzas packages with fresh fruit juice rather than with colas – nowadays served only on demand.

Cola manufacturers have reported a massive 40 percent drop in sales in August, the slack being taken up by unfashionable fruit juice vendors who ply their business on the street corners and the more trendy ‘juice-bars’ that have suddenly sprouted up in India’s cities.

Amoretto’s, a firm which operates eight juice bars in Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta, now has plans to increase them to 21 outlets by the end of the year, thanks to a growing fad for all kinds of fruit juice among the well-heeled.

The switch from colas to fresh fruit juice is easy given that India is among the world’s biggest producers. It has an annual output of around 50 million tonnes, although the packaging industry is still lagging and lacks the technology of the advanced countries.

Meanwhile, the central government has announced that it would shortly pass an ordinance to fix standards for drinking water, including that used by the bottling industry. So far, the cola companies seem to have avoided costly purification processes because of a total lack of standards.

On Thursday, Union Health Minister Sushma Swaraj released the results of tests carried out by the government on 12 brands of softdrinks, which showed nine of them failing to meet European standards for pesticide residues. Swaraj has chosen to declare the beverages ”safe by present standard”.

However, all the samples tested by the Central Food and Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) were found to contain lindane, a pesticide banned for agricultural use in the European Union and several other countries because of its proven toxicity to the liver and kidneys.

The Indian Parliament, which has already banned colas and softdrinks from its premises, said reinstatement could happen only after an all-party parliamentary committee clears this. That is bad news for those who would ‘colanise’ this country.