The ‘Wild West’ of groundwater: Billion-dollar Nestlé extracting B.C.’s drinking water for free

[Fire Walk With Me]

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Wild+West+groundwater+Billion+dollar+company+extracting+drinking/8785227/story.html

Because of B.C.’s lack of groundwater regulation, Nestlé Waters Canada — a division of the multi-billion-dollar Switzerland-based Nestlé Group, the world’s largest food company — is not required to measure, report, or pay a penny for the millions of litres of water it draws from Hope and then sells across Western Canada.

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“No permit, no reporting, no tracking, no nothing,” said David Slade, co-owner of Drillwell Enterprises, a Vancouver Island well-drilling company. “So you could drill a well on your property, and drill it right next to your neighbour’s well, and you could pump that well at 100 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and waste all the water, pour it on the ground if you wanted to … As far as depleting the resource, or abusing the resource, there is no regulation. So it is the Wild, Wild West.”

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If you walk into Cooper’s Foods in downtown Hope — less than 5 km away from Nestlé’s bottling plant — and buy a 1.5 litre bottle of Nestlé Pure Life water, it will set you back $1.19.

That’s $1.19 more than Nestle paid to the government last year for withdrawing more than 265 million litres of fresh water from the well.

(Via Idle No More Official on Facebook.)


For a great deal more reading, including video of Nestle's 2005 CEO clearly stating that water is not a human right, it should be taken and sold for profit:

Water privatization by the richest rich is happening now ("hydraulic empire&quot incl. the Bush family
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023406830