Speaker distorts Coca Cola’s practices at Sustainability seminar

On October 5, Aquinas College played host to a forum organized by the group Michigan Interfaith Power and Light. The forum featured Andy Hoffman with the Frederick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.

The Grand Rapids Press was the only local news source to report on this event with an article published one week after the fact. The Press story reads like stenography, with the reporter providing a brief summary of the keynote talk and a few quotes from the speaker.

At one point the article states that Hoffman told students that they could choose to run businesses differently, which suggests that the audience was made up of some business majors.

Hoffamn was then quoted as he, “credited technology and sustainability reporting from the network-based organization, Global Reporting Initiative, for making corporations more accountable with their ecological footprint.” It is true that the Global Reporting Initiative provides some guidelines for reporting on global corporate activity, but the list of supporters demonstrates the limits of such reporting practices.

The article continues with Hoffman telling he story of one activist who started the online site Indian Resource Center, which challenges corporate globalization in India. The site has particularly targeted Coca Cola, which Hoffman claims that the beverage giant “partners with local governments, nongovernment organizations, schools and communities to establish local rainwater harvesting facilities and renews and returns much of the groundwater it uses to local groundwater systems.”

This is what Coke is claiming, but the information on the Indian Resource Center would suggest otherwise with a recent posting that says that ground water levels have decreased significantly near a Coca Cola factory leaving communities and farmers without enough water.

The Press story then states that the online activist “is an example of how one person can force corporations to be transparent with environmental practices.” But Coca Cola has not been transparent with its practices. In fact, they have denied claims of global water rights activists and Colombian union activists around claims of the corporation’s awful ecological track record and its support for human right abuses in Colombia. The denial on the part of Coca Cola is the focus of the documentary The Coca Cola Case.

One reason why Hoffman is misrepresenting what Coca Cola’s practices are is because Coke is a financial supporter of the institute he works for. There is no monetary amount of what Coca Cola gives to the Erb Institute, but Dow Chemical and Alcoa have provided $2.5 million, while the Ford Motor Company has given $250,000. With major corporate polluters like these funding the Institute where Hoffman works, it’s no wonder that he would misrepresent what Coca Cola’s actual corporate practices really are. Unfortunately, this was a fact the Press reported never bothered to investigate.