A third of the population of Fiji does not have access to clean drinking water, a BBC investigation has revealed.
The report, for its Panorama documentary series, showed how many Fijians are falling ill and dying from typhoid and other diseases caused by a lack of safe, clean water.
The irony is that the South Pacific islands have a flourishing bottled water industry, worth over $150 million per year and employs around 700 people.
Bottles of Fiji natural mineral water are a common sight in restaurants and on supermarket shelves across the U.S. and Europe, and have been featured on a number of popular televisions shows.
In early July, the Fijian government announced a tax on bottled water designed to conserve the island’s depleting natural resources, but it was forced to abort the project last week following pressure from the powerful water bottling lobby group.
The bottling companies subsequently halted operations and closed down factories, saying they could no longer effectively operate their businesses with the new tax.
The interim government’s former finance minister Mahendra Chaudhry said the tax was not new and had been imposed in other countries to generate revenue in a similar fashion. “The bottled water companies do not have to observe this [tax], they can pass it onto the consumers,” he said.
The protests were set to cost the country up to $3 million in lost export revenue each week, forcing the government to drop the tax proposal in late August.
Meanwhile, the water bottling industry in Fiji wants a tax-free status like other industries and says it is working on a compensation amount it needs from the government.
Jay Dayal, industry spokesman, said the industry also wants the government to help in marketing incentives and subsidize tax-free imports. “That way, the industry would be able to generate more foreign revenue for the country”, he said.
Dayal said they were trying to figure out what levels were paid to the water industry in other countries before making their own demands. “We are working on some form of compensation we are expecting from the government.”