TROUBLED WATERS

BOTTLED Life is a 2012 documentary that accuses Nestlé of monopolising public water sources to the exclusion of local communities, be they in middle America or shanty towns in Africa.

Among other things, the Swiss-made documentary reported that in the US town of Fryeburg, Maine, Nestlé made a practice of paying $10 to load a truck full of water, and reselling it for $50 000.

Bottling companies pump water from an aquifer underneath the town. As one online comment put it: “The streets of Fryeburg should be paved with gold” — although a Nestlé spokesman denied the figures. Last month town residents delivered 135 000 signatures to the local authority to protest the company’s proposed 45-year contract to extract water from the aquifer.

Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck had a different take: “The extreme view insists that water should be declared a public right,” he said in a 2005 interview, featured in the documentary. “The other view is that water is a foodstuff and, just like any foodstuff, it should have a market value.”

Brabeck’s comments irritated humanrights activists so much that his interview went viral in April. He responded by writing a Huffington Post blog in which he denied suggesting that “clean and safe” water was not a basic human right. Instead, he notes he was simply railing against “others” who “use excess amounts for non-essential purposes, without bearing a fairer cost for the infrastructure needed to supply it”.

His response did not address the issue of how essential it is to extract pristine water from aquifers and sell it to markets that already have access to safe tap water.