Coca-Cola’s investment in Africa is not about solving hunger

Coca-Cola’s investment in Africa is not about solving hunger

Date: 6 August 2014

Yesterday, Coca Cola announced it would expand its business activities in Africa. The corporate giant announced it will increase investments in Africa by $5 billion over the next 6 years, bringing the total to $17 billion by 2020. Coca Cola is part of the latest wave of corporations moving in to Africa to secure markets, land, resources and labour which promise vast corporate profits. With African small scale farmers facing the risk of being squeezed out of their livelihoods, many African activist groups have called this a “new wave of colonialism”.

As part of its new investments, Coca Cola will launch Source Africa, a partnership with the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and Grow Africa, to source “consistent and sustainable” local ingredients in African countries. The New Alliance and Grow Africa are two development programmes using the offer of rich countries’ aid money and private investment to open up African countries to the might of big agribusiness – all in the name of tackling hunger and poverty. Coca Cola’s Source Africa promises an array of benefits for African communities including new jobs, support for sustainability initiatives, safe water access, and women’s empowerment. Yet on the same days as Coca Cola’s announcement the New Alliance, backed by £600 million of UK aid, released findings in its latest Progress Report that present good reasons to be sceptical of the corporation’s grand promises.  

As of May this year, 277 companies had pledged to invest a total of $8 billion in African foods systems as part of the New Alliance. Lured by the backing of G7 governments and pro-business policy reforms by African governments, corporations including the UK’s Unilever, SABMiller and Diageo, together with African companies, have argued that their investments are good news for African communities wanting jobs, income and other benefits.

Yet the New Alliance’s 2013-14 Progress Report revealed that only 65 corporate investors had reported any data on the social impacts of their investments to date. More revealing is the corporation’s impacts on women. It’s widely accepted that with little control of land and resources, women face some of the biggest barriers to economic development. Yet of the corporations that did report their impacts, only 21 per cent of small holder farmers ‘reached’ by corporate projects are women. At no point in the report is ‘reached’ defined. But yesterday’s progress report suffers from an even bigger omission: two years into the programme, it makes no attempt to assess the New Alliance’s direct impact on food security and nutrition in Africa.

That’s because initiatives like the New Alliance aren’t about solving hunger. They are about facilitating corporations’ increased control of food systems at the expense of the people that depend on them. The New Alliance puts the economic development and food security of African communities in the hands of profit-driven corporations. Yet the corporations involved clearly feel no pressure to prove that their impact on communities is a positive one. As the New Alliance brings on more corporate players with little accountability, the UK government continues to support it with aid money. Instead, the UK and other governments should support communities in Africa and beyond to build food systems that are controlled by and for themselves, not corporate giants like Coca Cola. 

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr