Colleges Boycott Coke Over Concerns

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , NEW YORK
Sunday, Jan 01, 2006,Page 11

When students at the University of Michigan return to campus next week after the holiday break, they will find the Coke machines and fountain dispensers empty.

The university, which has 50,000 students on three campuses, on Thursday became the 10th college to stop selling Coca-Cola products because of concerns arising from accusations about the company's treatment of workers in bottling plants in Colombia and environmental problems in India.

A Coke spokeswoman, Kari Bjorhus, said on Friday in a statement that the company hoped the Michigan decision was temporary.

She said Coca-Cola was looking at ways to conduct an independent third-party study of the situation in Colombia.

Labor activists have said that Coca-Cola, through its Latin American bottlers, has been complicit in the deaths of eight union leaders and in continued harassment of unionized employees.

In India, a different group of activists have accused Coke of polluting the soil and groundwater near several bottling plants, of severely reducing groundwater levels in drought-prone areas and of failing to install adequate filtration systems that would remove pesticides from the water used to make its products.

The activists, led by two groups, Corporate Accountability International and the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, have found a sympathetic ear on college campuses.

Within the last year, New York University, Rutgers University in New Jersey and Santa Clara University in California, among others, have stopped selling Coke products.

The University of Michigan had set yesterday as a deadline for Coke to select an auditor and agree on the terms of the investigation. But talks between the company and the university broke down.

Coke says the accusations about India are groundless.

The company says that its use of water in India has become more efficient and that it has begun harvesting rainwater to help return it to underground sources.

BSI Links to the Source to bring you what Coke has to say.