Killer Coke at Global Village

Issued : Friday 18 August, 2006

4500 young people, one third of whom had travelled from more than 40 countries around the world, recently joined in a 10-day camp hosted by the Woodcraft Folk, an internationalist and ecology-minded organisation for young people in Britain. The main theme of Global Village 2006 was to struggle against global poverty by mobilising young people to achieve the UN's millennium development goals, which aim to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

 

The international committee organising the camp decided before the event to support Sinaltrainal's call for a world-wide boycott of Coca-Cola and ban its products from sale at Global Village. By the end of the camp, everyone had heard about the reasons for this decision. Amy N., 15 years old and from a township in South Africa's Cape province, appeared on the popular nightly GVTV news programme pouring what appeared to be blood from a bottle of Coca-Cola as she explained why Colombian trade unionists and Indian farmers call for a boycott and publicising a workshop on Coca-Cola in Colombia. [This is contained within the movie that can be downloaded here ]

A stall set up one afternoon sold 50 copies of the Killer Coke magazine and sold out of t-shirts; 1,500 campaign leaflets were distributed. Two workshops were held on Coca-Cola, each attended by several dozen youth of different nationalities, resulting in a decision to continue campaigning within Woodcraft by setting up an e-mail list to coordinate anti-Coke activities by Woodcraft members