COKE & PEPSI SUPPORTING ILLEGAL LAND SIEZURES IN THIRD WORLD 16OKT13

I seldom drink pop (soda), but now when having to choose I know it will not be coke or pepsi until they end their dealings with those companies who committing illegal land grabs to supply coke and pepsi and their affiliates with sugar for their products. Please consider boycotting these products and sign the petition from SumOfUs.....

Coke and Pepsi are buying sugar from companies that have been caught driving small farmers and indigenous communities off their land. Tell the beverage giants they need a zero-tolerance policy for land-grabs now.

We’ve just found out that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are supplied by companies that have been caught driving indigenous people and small farmers from their ancestral land all around the world.
Our partners at Oxfam have discovered that a sugar company in Brazil has forced a small community from its land and sent a gang of thugs to burn down 53 families' homes -- all to supply sugar to companies like Coke and Pepsi. In Cambodia, a major sugar company drove hundreds of families from their land -- because they no longer had documentation they lost during the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.
These horror stories are only the tip of the iceberg. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been alerted, but they’ve failed to implement policies to stop their suppliers from grabbing land. Now we need to show them that consumers are ready to hold them accountable.
Tell Coca-Cola and Pepsi: ensure that your suppliers aren’t stealing land.
For the last decade, the price of sugar and other agricultural commodities has skyrocketed, and investors have gobbled up more than 33 million hectares (81,544,449 acres) of land in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, frequently displacing people who lived and worked on the land for generations.
As food prices skyrocket, small farmers are losing their livelihoods along with their homes. Indigenous communities are having their traditional ways of life destroyed as their ancestral hunting and farming land is seized to make way for sugar production. And sugar producers frequently resort to violence and intimidation to drive people off their land when they can’t evict them legally.
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are some of the world’s largest purchasers of sugar, and they have the power to hold sugar growers accountable for grabbing land and displacing small farmers. By adopting zero-tolerance policies for land grabs, the beverage giants could ensure that sugar producers can’t afford to drive poor farmers off their land. But right now, Coke and Pepsi don’t even bother to monitor their suppliers’ behavior.
The only way these companies will change their ways is if consumers stand up and make them. We know that the SumOfUs community can convince beverage companies to take a stand for human rights -- just last year we got Pepsi to speak out against Uganda’s “kill the gays” law. Now we need to come together again to ensure that the beverage industry doesn’t profit by robbing impoverished farmers.
Click here to sign the petition demanding that Coca-Cola and Pepsi stand up to land grabbers.
Thanks for all you do,
Rob, Angus, Paul and the rest of us

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More Information:
Oxfam accuses Coke and Pepsi of taking land from the poor, The Independent, 02 October 2013.