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Date Published: 22/05/2001
Author: Paul Kingsnorth Coca-Cola’s latest world domination plans could have dire consequences. Paul Kingsnorth reports. |
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A few months ago, reports started appearing in the financial sections of newspapers, and on the websites of some campaign groups, about the latest, secretive, mission of the vast Coca-Cola company. No-one took much notice, but if the reports are true, they may have to start doing so soon. For the implications are far-reaching.
Coca-Cola, it was reported, is working on a project with the stunningly arrogant name of ‘Project Mother’. The idea is simple: with the market for its various fizzy, sugary drinks increasingly saturated, Coca-Cola is looking into new lines which it can develop; in the words of one of its spokesmen, it is moving towards becoming a ‘total beverage company’. And one of the most potentially lucrative new fields is milk drinks for children.
Children all over the world drink a lot of milk, and Coca-Cola knows it. The potential market for a global line of milk products, pushed with the vast marketing and distribution power of the Coca-Cola company thus makes good business sense. Coca-Cola isn’t giving much away about Project Mother, but it has made some things clear. Milk is a potentially huge market, but it apparently has ‘image problems’. It isn’t ‘hip, refreshing or something kids will want to drink in public’. Coca-Cola thus wants to develop a new line of milk drinks, aimed at the under-12s, which will counteract this image, and make milk as cool as Coca-Cola seems for children.
Any day now, it plans to test-market some new milk-based drinks in the US, Europe and Latin America. Indeed, Coca-Cola spokesman Rob Baskin said back in December that there were already ‘literally dozens of new projects going on worldwide’ in which Coca-Cola was test-marketing new ideas. If they work, the future is already mapped out: it will be all systems go for the Cola-nisation of the dairy industry.
The implications are huge and disturbing. Most obviously, if Project Mother succeeds, it could lead to the domination of the global milk industry by the world’s most powerful drinks company. But the problems it could cause for the environment, farming and animal health are also potentially huge.
Industrial milk production is already one of the world’s grimmest industries. The more milk we drink, the more cows need to produce, and this has already led to a system of intensive dairy farming that increasingly treats cows as intensive milk machines for humans. According to the animal welfare group PETA, over half of America’s cows already live on intensive farms, spending their whole lives in barns with concrete floors, attached to milking machines, which often give the cows electric shocks. Mastitis, a bacterial infection common to intensive farming, infects millions of cows, and often leaves pus residues in the milk they produce.
But this is only half the story. Today, due to increased milk demand worldwide, the average cow produces about twice as much milk as 30 years ago; and often up to 100 times more than it would produce in its natural state. Cows of the 1990s live only about five years – as opposed to 20–25 years 50 years ago. They are stuffed with an array of drugs and chemicals to prevent illness and increase their productivity, including the notorious genetically modified Bovine Growth Hormone. Meanwhile, the calves which the cows have to give birth to regularly to stimulate their milk supply are usually taken from their mothers within 24 hours and sold for veal or beef. Within 60 days, the cow will be impregnated again. A typical factory-farmed dairy cow will give birth three or four times in her five-year life. None of her calves will taste her milk.
If the situation for the animals is horrific, the situation for small, family and organic farmers is increasingly grim too. As with other areas of agriculture, dairy farming is dominated by economies of scale, and the buying power of vast corporations. The result has been a drop in the number of small dairy farms all over the western world, and an increase in huge, corporate, intensive farms, where the animals are subjected to the grim conditions described above in the name of efficiency and competitiveness. Then there are the environmental implications. Intensively-farmed cows in the US, according to PETA, are fed more than 81 lb of food, including grain, hay and silage, plus 45 gallons of water – all of which is, itself, intensively produced on deteriorating agricultural land.
Project Mother, if it were to work as Coca-Cola wants it to, would have the inevitable effect of spreading intensive farming techniques all over the world, as milk consumption expanded and new markets were broken into by the world’s biggest drinks company. Animals, the environment, small farmers and – yes – mothers around the world would all suffer from Coca-Cola’s grandiose ambitions. Coca-Cola, of course, would undoubtedly make a mint. Unless opposition to its intended colonisation of the world’s milk begins to build...
Paul Kingsnorth is deputy editor of The Ecologist.
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