Today you have a situation where now the prescription is: People who dont have enough money to buy food should end up paying for their drinking water. That is going to be the kind of situation in which you will get more child labor. You will get more exploitation of women. Youre going to get an absolutely exploitative economy as the very basis of living becomes a source of capital accumulation and corporate growth. In fact, the chief of Coca-Cola in India said: Our biggest market in India comes from the fact that there is no drinking water left. People will have to buy Coca-Cola.
Something is very, very wrong when people dont have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.
Its not that Monsanto is making money out of the blue. Its making money by coercing and literally forcing people to pay for what was free. Take water, for instance. Water has always been free. Weve never paid for drinking water. The World Bank says the reason water has been misused is because it was never commercially priced. But the reason its been misused is because it was wasted by the big usersindustry, which polluted it.
There are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute the groundwater with nitrates. There is a scarcity in diversity when you create huge cornfields with the same strain of corn so that when one disease strikes - which happened in the United States in the 70s - all the cornfields in the country are wiped out. That was the first time the U.S. realized the value of diversity in agriculture and began to discuss genetic resources and their conservation.
