Across the globe in underdeveloped countries and across rural America a nasty little flim flam is reenacted again and again. The marks in these swindle are usually economically impoverished but resource rich rural communities desperate for jobs and uninformed about their rights. A casual scan of city council minutes around rural American, indeed, rural Oregon would more often than not see mention of a presentation by lawyers representing a fortune 500 company thinking of setting up shop in their community.
These companies promise multimillion dollar investments in the community in the form of new processing or manufacturing plants. They promise local jobs and future prosperity if only they can have access to public resources like minerals, timber and water. They even promise to contribute to the local tax base once the proffered tax incentives like enterprise zones are exhausted. They promise to do no harm to the environment.
They promise to apply for the proper permits and abide by all conditions and to be the best of community partners. Just such a drama is playing out right here in Coos County with strip miners, Oregon Resources, and it is also playing out in Cascade Locks, Oregon, with Nestle Bottled Water.
Just as the management of Oregon Resources has a history in Brantley County, Georgia, working for Iluka Resources, Nestle has a history in Michigan and Ohio.
To meet the exponentially growing demand for bottled water, in the late ’90s Perrier subsidiary Great Spring Waters of America sought to open a major pumping and bottling operation in the Midwest. First the company tried to set up shop in Adams County, Wisconsin, but they were driven away by intense opposition from residents and local government.
So in 2001 Perrier, which has since been bought by Nestle Waters North America, was welcomed with open arms by then-Michigan Gov. John Engler, who allowed the company to open up a plant for a licensing fee of less than $100 per year and offered millions in tax breaks to boot.
Construction started on the plant even before all the necessary permits had been obtained. For the past year and a half, the plant has been pumping 100 to 300 gallons per minute out of an aquifer on a hunting preserve in Mecosta County and piping the water 11 miles away to a bottling plant in Stanwood, where it is prepared for shipping and sale around the Midwest as Nestle’s Ice Mountain brand.
In short, neither jobs nor increased revenue for local taxing districts made the privatization of public resources profitable for people living in Michigan and they suddenly found streams flowing the opposite direction and severe damage to their local ecosystems. Who gets to clean up the mess? Why the public, of course.
There is more on Nestle’s history of resource extraction on this report – oregon-nestle
For more on the issue of water resources read Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water
