Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized
Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.
The company notorious for sending out hordes of ‘internet warriors’ to defend the company and its actions online in comments and message boards (perhaps we’ll find some below) even takes a firm stance behind Monsanto’s GMOs and their ‘proven safety’. In fact, the former Nestle CEO actually says that his idea of water privatization is very similar to Monsanto’s GMOs. In a video interview, Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe states that there has never been ‘one illness’ ever caused from the consumption of GMOs.
The way in which this sociopath clearly has zero regard for the human race outside of his own wealth and the development of Nestle, who has been caught funding attacks against GMO labeling, can be witnessed when watching and listening to his talk on the issue. This is a company that actually goes into struggling rural areas and extracts the groundwater for their bottled water products, completely destroying the water supply of the area without any compensation. In fact, they actually make rural areas in the United States foot the bill.
As reported on by Corporate Watch, Nestle and former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe have a long history of disregarding public health and abusing the environment to take part in the profit of an astounding $35 billion in annual profit from water bottle sales alone.
The report states:
“Nestlé production of mineral water involves the abuse of vulnerable water resources. In the Serra da Mantiqueira region of Brazil, home to the “circuit of waters” park whose groundwater has a high mineral content and medicinal properties, over-pumping has resulted in depletion and long-term damage.”
Nestle has also come under fire over the assertion that they are actually conducting business with massive slavery rings. Another Corporate Watch entry details:
“In 2001, Nestlé faced criticism for buying cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which may have been produced using child slaves.[58] According to an investigative report by the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo were being purchased from their destitute parents and shipped to the Ivory Coast, to be sold as slaves to cocoa farms.”
So is water a human right, or should it be owned by big corporations? Well, if water is not here for all of us, then perhaps air should be owned by major corporations as well. And as for crops, Monsanto is already working hard to make sure their monopoly on our staple crops and beyond is well situated. It should really come as no surprise that this Nestle Chairman fights to keep Monsanto’s GMOs alive and well in the food supply, as his ideology lines right up with that of Monsanto.
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Lbo3103: Some kind of boycott really needs to be started. I have heard nothing but negative things about nestle and its business practices for years now. Personally I don’t think I buy anything made by nestle however the company is so big who knows what they have their hands in.
Tsmitty247: What a f**king rich entitled piece of sh*t
Artystrong1: ***DO NOT BE COME ADDICTED TO WATER MY FRIENDS, YOU WILL RESENT ITS ABSENCE.***
Andromedanus: If you look at what he actually said, you can see that the title is bullsh*t.
What he actually did say was that the unrestricted access to clean drinking water should not be a human right and that clean drinking water should be treated as commodity and therefore have a price tag attached to it.
He also stated that people should definitely be provided with the clean drinking water that they require.
obliterationn: Evil much
comeondantheman: Holy sh*t, do you people just rehash the same content over and over and over or what? Like Jesus Christ, he said this like a decade ago.
alvarezg: ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!! Privatized water is a license to exploit. The people who use the water must retain control of it.
mrsuckmypearl: So then why does he own it? F**king jackass
ArchdukeBurrito: Net neutrality doesn’t stand a chance if we can’t even keep WATER as a public utility.
Vairman: I don’t know about the rest of y’all but I pay for the water that comes out of my taps. Not with taxes but the old fashioned way: I get I bill, I write a check. How much more privatized does it need to be?
J1nRoh: Trump. Net Neutrality. No water. I can see it happening.
WTFppl: Too Nestle CEO: I will water-board you when I find you! It’s not a right, it would be a privilege.
mliving: Says the guy who’s company has been pumping BILLION$ of litres of municipal water in Ontario WITH EXPIRED PERMITS. F**ka You!
bukithd: It’s quantum of solace but irl
notajock: Psychopath!
ExgeniusExventions: Sounds like anarchy. lets go to where he sleeps and eat his children.
MrSedAwk: Actually right… dig a hole where you stand. If you or your kin can’t then you should figure out a way to support your life.
grislyaddams: Stainless steel bottles and a filter for tap water. F**k Nestle, not just for this, but I’m sure y’all are aware of what they did in Africa with their baby formula…
Dank_Meems: I love when rich people tell me how to live my life from their little fantasy bubble.
HotBananaa: And it starts. I watched a documentary years ago called Blue Gold. They basically went over this and said it is GOING to happen and that all these big wig rich families are buying land that has natural water springs on it for this exact reason.
bearreb: Water, which we are made up of and cannot live without IS a basic human right. Pretty much the most basic.
HibikiSS: Well, he can go f**k himself.
GK8888: I seem to recall seeing this issue come up a year or so ago and his comments were taken grossly out of context in order to make him look like a monster.
Nestle is still terrible with the way it runs it’s water business, but there is a reason there is no quotation cited in the article that supports the title.
berrie88: If you think you’re not already paying for the right to drink water, you’re mental. What do you think tap water is? It is owned by the government, and you pay for the right to have it hooked up to your house, and you pay for the amount of water you use every month.
What Nestle is asking to do is bring more competition, which might force utility companies to either increae prices, or more than likely, decrease prices.
alienatedandparanoid: What a sick f**k. He and people like him are C.H.U.D.s.
Dummy_Detector: This man should be put in an insane asylum and forgotten .
cryo: Funny how there is no quote of him saying that on the page. That’s usually because he didn’t (although I don’t know). At any rate, the site is blatantly biased, so I wouldn’t really trust must on it.
TexanMcDaniel: I’ve taken a few water management related classes and this issue has been brought up a few times. It always ended with the majority of the class AND the professor agreeing that water is not a human right because there is a very limited amount of water on the planet and possibly an infinite amount of people.
tchollinginthedeep: He’s 100% right.
Sly-Apple-Pie: This guy is either retarded or he really wants to be a villain. Why would anyone say anything like this?
TheGreatRoh: Agreed. A commodity is literally not a human right.
JosephStall: Wait, don’t we already pay for water though? Water and electricity in housing? Paying for water is nothing new
johnyann: Nestle might be the scummiest company of all time.
Check out what those fuckers did with powdered milk to third world populations, specifically brazil.
AthiestCowboy: So which Fucking is it reddit? I read about once a week about how either…
* Nestle pumps water from public grounds for free and we grab pitchforks
* Nestle wants to privatize/trade access to water tables so that it can be paid for and managed by the free market and we grab pitchforks
icount2tenanddrinkt: water is as far as we know a prerequisite of live, this should be factored in to anybody that is involved in making a profit from it.
Korlis: I usually have a pretty diverse vocabulary.
I am, linguistically, rather creative.
I’m an angry sort of person.
But despite all this, I cannot adequately put into words the towering rage this man’s very existence fills me with. He has zero right to life. He should be put in a room filled with a hundred years worth of Nestle water bottles and a 100″, 4k truecolour flatscreen with 7.1 Dolby digital surround. On this entertainment system will be shown, live, and outside his ability to turn off or damage, a feed off his entire family/bloodline slowly dying of thirst. They will be fed, dry food, fibre mostly, to draw out the ordeal as long as possible. Once they are all dead, the footage will be put on loop, he will be sealed in the room with enough food to last him the rest of his life.
Nope. Still doesn’t get it across.
Even an “I have no mouth, yet I must scream” scenario wouldn’t cut it.
I just can’t…
tht1d00d: So where is he quoted saying this?
bjs2: Water *isn’t* a human right. Have we forgotten what that means?
goingtohateme: Don’t worry, GOP and Trump will fix this. They stand for the little people like us regular joes
vegi71: I think maybe he meant to say nationalised.
Lutherkiss3: Wow! That’s just evil if he did say that
Metron1992: Being anti Communism is okay, but that doesn’t justify being an out and out Bastard in the name of Capitalism
Here is another related conspiracy that Nestle is out to rob water from folks …
Nestle bottles millions of litres of Canadian water — and pays nothing – Billion-dollar company extracting B.C.’s drinking water for free, then selling it back to Canadians
The price of a litre of bottled water in B.C. is often higher than a litre of gasoline.
However, the price paid by the world’s largest bottled water company for taking 265 million litres of fresh water every year from a well in the Fraser Valley — not a cent.
Because of B.C.’s lack of groundwater regulation, Nestlé Waters Canada — a division of the multi-billion-dollar Switzerland-based Nestlé Group, the world’s largest food company — is not required to measure, report, or pay a penny for the millions of litres of water it draws from Hope and then sells across Western Canada.
According to the provincial Ministry of Environment, “B.C. is the only jurisdiction in Canada that doesn’t regulate groundwater use.”
“The province does not license groundwater, charge a rental for groundwater withdrawals or track how much bottled water companies are taking from wells,” said a Ministry of Environment spokesperson in an email to The Province.
This isn’t new. Critics have been calling for change for years now, saying the lack of groundwater regulation is just one outdated example from the century-old Water Act.
The Ministry of Environment has said they plan — in the 2014 legislature sitting — to introduce groundwater regulation with the proposed Water Sustainability Act, which would update and replace the existing Water Act, established in 1909. But experts note that successive governments have been talking about modernizing water for decades, but the issue keeps falling off the agenda.
It’s really the Wild West out here in terms of groundwater
This time, many hope it will be different.
“It’s really the Wild West out here in terms of groundwater. And it’s been going on for over 20 years, that the Ministry of Environment, the provincial government has been saying that they’re going to make these changes, and it just hasn’t gone through yet,” said Linda Nowlan, conservation director from World Wildlife Fund Canada.
‘They take it and sell it back to us’
In the District of Hope, Nestlé’s well draws from the same aquifer relied upon by about 6,000 nearby residents, and some of them are concerned.
“We have water that’s so clean and so pure, it’s amazing. And then they take it and sell it back to us in plastic bottles,” said Hope resident Sharlene Harrison-Hinds.
Sheila Muxlow lives in nearby Chilliwack, downstream the Fraser River from Hope. As campaign director for the WaterWealth Project, she often hears from Hope residents who worry about the government’s lack of oversight with Nestlé’s operations there.
“It’s unsettling,” Muxlow said. “What’s going to happen in the long term, if Nestlé keeps taking and taking and taking?”
While Nestlé is the largest bottled water seller in B.C., others, including Whistler Water and Mountain Spring Water, also draw groundwater from B.C.
When asked by The Province, those companies declined to release the volume of their withdrawals.
A large employer in Hope
Nestlé is one of the largest employers in the District of Hope, providing about 75 jobs, said District of Hope chief administrative officer John Fortoloczky. Though Nestlé is not required to measure and report their water withdrawals to the government, the company voluntarily reports to the District of Hope, said a Nestlé Waters Canada executive, reached in Guelph, Ont. last week.
“What we do in Hope exceeds what is proposed by the province of British Columbia,” said John Challinor, Nestlé Waters Canada’s director of corporate affairs. Nestle keeps records of water quality and the company’s mapping of the underground water resources in the area exceeds what government scientists have done, Challinor said.
“We do these annual reports … We’re doing it voluntarily with (the local government). If we are asked to provide it as a condition of a new permit, that’s easy to do, because we’re already doing it,” Challinor said.
But the fact that Nestlé’s reports are internal and voluntary is the very issue of concern, said Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“There’s a big, big difference between voluntary reporting and mandatory,” said Parfitt. “If it’s voluntary, there’s nothing to stop a company or major water user from choosing not to report … That is absolutely critical. You can’t run a system like this on a voluntary basis.”
Since groundwater remains unregulated in B.C., Nestle does not require a permit for the water they withdraw.
“No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing,” said David Slade, co-owner of Drillwell Enterprises, a Vancouver Island well-drilling company. “So you could drill a well on your property, and drill it right next to your neighbour’s well, and you could pump that well at 100 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste all the water, pour it on the ground if you wanted to … As far as depleting the resource, or abusing the resource, there is no regulation. So it is the Wild, Wild West.”
Water should be a ‘public trust’
The Council of Canadians, a national citizen advocacy group, takes the position that water should be treated as a public trust, a valuable resource protected for the benefit of all Canadians.
But when the government allows a multi-billion dollar, international corporation to withdraw water for free to sell back to us, this doesn’t seem to serve the public good, said Emma Lui, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians, reached in Ottawa. Compared with the rest of the country, Lui said, “When you look at all these different factors, B.C. actually is doing quite poorly: that they don’t include groundwater (in their water licensing system), they don’t have any sort of public registry of who’s taking groundwater, they don’t charge.”
No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing
Nestlé is far from the only large company withdrawing B.C.’s groundwater for free, and Challinor said Nestlé is “largely supportive of what the government is trying to do” with modernizing the Water Act. He said he plans to sit down with B.C.’s new environment minister Mary Polak in the fall, to discuss these issues. Nestle supports the government moving toward increased regulation, monitoring and reporting.
As far as the government charging for groundwater, Challinor said “We have no problem with paying for water, as long as the price is based on the actual cost of regulating the program.”
If you walk into Cooper’s Foods in downtown Hope — less than 5 km away from Nestlé’s bottling plant — and buy a 1.5 litre bottle of Nestlé Pure Life water, it will set you back $1.19.
That’s $1.19 more than Nestle paid to the government last year for withdrawing more than 265 million litres of fresh water from the well.
Nestlé’s other water bottling plant in Canada is in Wellington County, Ont., where the province requires them to buy a license and pay for the water they extract. Some critics, including Lui and Parfitt, feel that Ontario’s charge of $3.71 per million litres is still too paltry. But still, they say, it’s more fair than B.C. charging nothing.
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YaBoyVolke: Same thing happens in the U.S.
ImmortalAl: Nestle is such an evil company.
bizmarxie: This is why we need a good, in-corrupted government that works for the people.
ImmortalAl: “No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing,” said David Slade, co-owner of Drillwell Enterprises, a Vancouver Island well-drilling company. “So you could drill a well on your property, and drill it right next to your neighbour’s well, and you could pump that well at 100 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste all the water, pour it on the ground if you wanted to … As far as depleting the resource, or abusing the resource, there is no regulation. So it is the Wild, Wild West.”
69dankmeme420: I’m in no way calling them good or bad, but simply providing some useful information.
Nestle can get water from many different countries for free, and they can for a reason.
When Nestle chooses to take water from B.C., Canada, they are not simply taking water and profiting. They set up a refinery of sorts, which gives local construction jobs, they hire Canadians to run this refinery, they hire local truck drivers to move said water, they hire locals to run the bottling process, they pay taxes on their gains, the employees pay income tax, and throughout all this, it doesn’t even put a dent in the amount of freshwater Canada has to spare.
To me, the real issue is that they continue to bottle water in towns with droughts WHILE the droughts happening… but I don’t have exact figures to draw any conclusions to it.
3Msleep: Welcome to capitalism
ImmortalAl: “We have water that’s so clean and so pure, it’s amazing. And then they take it and sell it back to us in plastic bottles,” said Hope resident Sharlene Harrison-Hinds.
mirkogradski: Side note: I just saw today that Nestle acquired Garden of Life, an organic and natural supplement company. Pretty ironic. Guess Garden of Life was fine with throwing their values out the window.
MonsterBarge: What’s the conspiracy exactly here?
It’s known, right?
What’s the big hidden plan/agenda?
Are they skipping paying the tax on their profits or something?
LittleBigTroll: In other news…
*”For the first time, seaborne radiation from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected in a Canadian salmon, says UVic chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen, who leads the InFORM coastal network that monitors marine radioactivity off BC.”*
Oh Hi Nestle, how’s it goin’?
c_parrott: but universal healthcare tho
GraniteRambler: Nestlé pays $200 to pump 210M gallons a year in Evart, MI, just 120 miles from Flint. [source](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/29/nestle-pays-200-a-year-to-bottle-water-near-flint-where-water-is-undrinkable)
Nestlé pay $624 to pump 30M gallons per year in San Bernardino National Forest in CA, even during the state’s drought. [source](http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2017/04/02/activists-everyone-californias-water-and-international-corporation-stealing/99964644/)
“What’s the conspiracy,” u/monsterbarge asks? A multinational corporation is conspiring to steal our most precious public resource, wrap it in polluting plastic, and sell it back to the public. Their marketing includes concerted campaigns to paint public water as “dirty” (setting aside communities like Flint, America’s water system is pretty damn good), creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of reduced investment in public water supplies. If ya’ll aren’t outraged you don’t get how fucking high the stakes are. When TSHTF, clean water will be fucking gold.
Blujayz90: I believe it’s something to do with NAFTA. If they charge more it becomes a controlled resource
Amidza: Redditors bottle content that was at the top of this sub months ago, repackage it and submit a link again.
DustinTurdo: Check out http://www.waterwarcrimes.com
salatsalat: arent they doing this everywhere?
CastleFrankl: Why buy bottle water? Attach a filter on your tap.
=profit every time you refill your bottle. Been doing this for years.
OldFoxfire5: As a Michigander I want them to stay the f**k out. Isn’t gonna happen, but here’s hoping
Choosethisday: Good. Imagine what it would cost if government was involved.
Whaddaya Say?