Fiji Water. Prescous resource being stripped for profit

Fiji Water: So cool, so fresh, so bad for the environment?
Sarah GilbertSarah Gilbert RSS Feed
Aug 24th 2009 at 2:00PM
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Filed under: Economy
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The story of Fiji Water, as detailed in a startling and detailed investigative piece in Mother Jones magazine this month, seems familiar. Leafing through the story, I found myself trying to remember where I'd read this tale before; like an old melody at the back of my brain, it hovered, just beyond memory.

Suddenly it came to me: it's Dole, it's West Indies Sugar Corporation, it's the old, old story. A company located in a lush, tropical location with a totalitarian government that welcomes foreign interests with deep pockets. It doesn't tax them, gives them access to the country's most precious natural resources, and stands by with heavy artillery in hand, protecting them while they strip the country.

Meanwhile, the country's citizens struggle with terrible poverty, hunger and squalid conditions. The only part of the story that Fiji Water has not yet repeated is the inevitable depletion of the resource -- in this case, a 17-mile-long aquifer to which Fiji Water has "near-exclusive access" -- and the subsequent abandonment of the country.



These agricultural water subsidies must be viewed in context: the stress from travelling to pollinate the almond "monoculture" crops like the ones the Resnicks grow, along with the pesticides they sell, are considered to be some of the major reasons that bees are succumbing to colony collapse disorder. And the Resnicks control an enormous amount of California water infrastructure that was built by public funds. They have a 48 percent interest in the Kern Water Bank, which was meant to collect water from aqueducts and the Kern River and to redistribute this water in times of drought.


The Resnicks and their Paramount Farms and Paramount Citrus could use the water to irrigate their fields (which are already subsidized by the government), or they could sell it to municipalities. According to critics, the Resnicks are "trying to 'game' the water market the way Enron gamed the energy market."

So the Resnicks are not known for their even-handedness with politicians or water, and their practices in the U.S. are not the greenest of all possible greens. In fact, they could share responsibility for many of our environmental woes. They could have a hand in California's future water shortages, during which they could profit gloriously. All the while, they are loudly and proudly marketing Fiji Water as the most environmentally friendly bottled water company in the world.