McFranchising McCloud

Jill followed her Water piece from two days ago with this link, but I thought it important to link to in full…

Rural Communities Exploited by Nestlé for Your Bottled Water
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted May 30, 2007

Bottled water costs way more than the few bucks you pay at the store. Across the U.S., rural communities are footing the bill for the booming bottled water industry. Nestlé’s advance on a small town in California is the latest example.

Across the country, multinational corporations are targeting hundreds of rural communities to gain control of their most precious resource. By strong-arming small towns with limited economic means, these corporations are part of a growing trend to privatize public water supplies for economic gain in the ballooning bottled water industry.

With sales of over $35 billion worldwide in the bottled water market, corporations are doing whatever it takes to buy up pristine springs in some of our country’s most beautiful places. While the companies reap the profits, the local communities and the environment are paying the price.

One of the biggest and most voracious of the water gobblers is Nestlé, which controls one-third of the U.S. market and sells 70 different brand names — such as Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Perrier, Poland Spring and Ice Mountain — which it draws from 75 springs located all over the country.

Nestlé’s latest target is McCloud, located in the shadow of Northern California’s snow-capped Mt. Shasta. The town of McCloud has worked hard to try to reinvent itself in recent years. McCloud is a former timber town that is learning how to stand on its own feet again after the lumber companies bottomed out and took off.

Read the full article here.