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Article in Mother Jones magazine assault Fiji Water

Fiji Water has responded to an article in Mother Jones magazine called ‘Fiji Water – Spins the Bottle’, which opens with the statement: "Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?" This is Fiji Water’s response to the article …

It is important to us that we give back to the communities in which we work and live. We know that Fiji has tremendous potential because we see it realised at our factory every day.

Part of our investment in Fiji comes from royalty and trust payments paid each year that is a percentage of our total volume. As we grow our business, we are able to contribute more in royalty payments. In 2008 alone, we paid $1.3m in royalties representing 1.5% of gross revenues of our Fijian company. These payments have allowed us to bring clean drinking water to the surrounding villages, infrastructure projects like electrification, kindergartens, secondary schools, renovations of community halls and much-needed health care clinics.

In addition, in late 2007 we created the Fiji Water Foundation to serve as a vehicle for social investment around the islands of Fiji. The Foundation has played a critical role in flood relief in Fiji, renovation of schools, and bringing much needed health care to rural villages. We have also partnered with the Rotary Club and Pacific Water for Life to bring clean water to 100 communities in Fiji this year. To date, FIJI Water Foundation has invested $600,000, directly impacting more than 50,000 beneficiaries in 11 of Fiji’s 14 Provinces.

With respect to the environmental issues raised in the article, our commitments are quite clear and laid out in www.FIJIGreen.com. We are the only bottled water company in the industry to publicly report its entire life cycle carbon emissions. We are independently audited and report to the Carbon Disclosure Project. And we are offsetting these emissions by 120%.

Land access issues are very delicate to negotiate in Fiji, but the Sovi Basin project remains on track and the 50,000 acres of the last remaining lowland rainforest in the South Pacific is protected now and through perpetuity from logging. The project will pay the local villagers not to sell their timber rights to logging companies. Deforestation of our tropical rainforests is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions. Protecting the Sovi Basin is the equivalent of removing two million cars from the highway.

Our carbon offset project in Fiji includes replanting the rainforests that have been decimated to plant sugarcane fields. Part of this effort includes planting native tree species, such as mango trees, to provide local villagers with a source of income. We are proud to create projects that protect the environment as well as provide for a source of sustainable income for the local Fijians.

It’s unfortunate that the reporter did not have the opportunity to speak to any one of the thousands of local people whose lives have been impacted in a very positive way because of Fiji Water. Had we known she was in Fiji, we would have been happy to escort her to any one of the 75 villages who have been a beneficiary of a clean water project sponsored by Fiji Water this year alone. She could have visited one of the villages surrounding our plant to visit a kindergarten that was recently built or to meet a local Fijian who received a life-saving corrective heart surgery by a physician we brought to the island.

The real irony here is that the reporter suggests that buying Fiji Water somehow legitimises a military dictatorship, when in fact the jobs, revenues and community projects supported by Fiji Water are strong contributors to growth in the well-being of the Fijian people.

Source: Fiji Green Blog

RELATED STORIES

• Fiji Water donates $500,000 to help flood victims

RELATED WEBSITES

• Original Mother Jones article
• Fiji Green
• Fiji Water Foundation