Water Woes.
November 24, 2009
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Agriculture is the largest consumer of water in almost every country. In many countries around the world, farmers are facing difficult times because of water shortages. In some cases the problem is discovered when one private interest sucks the water out from under a landowner in order to ship it elswhere. Pickens is doing it in Texas, Nestle in Maine, and Coca Cola in India. Syngenta does it by shipping produce, SABMiller by shipping beer.
The problem can be solved for some private interests by asking the other private interests, the landowners, to spend money to conserve water. The International Finance Group, a branch of the World Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank, a global financial institution, would like to lend money to the farmers so that they can buy products from New Holland Agriculture in order to conserve water.
This would be good for the farmers because they would carry the additional risk of having a loan to pay in bad years. This would be good for Syngenta, because they could make farmers sign contracts with them to sell produce in order get those loans. This would be good for local communities because they could replace locally grown produce with processed food from Syngenta. This would be good for New Holland because they would be paid for their drip irrigation systems. This would be especially good for Standard Charter if they could get Governments to provide them with money to lend. This would be good for Nestle, Pickens, Coke and Miller because there would be additional water available to them to bottle and ship at no additional cost.
Here is the plan, as spelled out by Syngenta, Coke, Miller, New Holland, Nestle, Standard and the International Finance Group. Pickens, in Texas is on his own.
This is enough for me to red thumb Coke and Nestle. (NSRGY.PK)
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