It points out that the typical American has an easier time drinking Fiji water than most people in Fiji, where half the people have no safe, reliable drinking water.  This, even given that if you buy one bottle of water, you could refill it with San Francisco tap water once a day for ten years, five months and 21 days before it costs you what you paid for the bottle.  “Put another way,” writes Charles Fishman, “if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.”  Wow.

Back to Fiji, though, for which half the wholesale cost is transportation.  The plastic for Fiji comes from abroad, and the plant operates twenty-four hours a day, powered by three big generators running on diesel fuel.  However, the plant pays locals twice the island’s informal minimum wage, and buys its engineering services and cardboard boxes locally.  This year, the amount of water bottled and shipped by Fiji’s 200 water bottlers will equal in dollar value the sugar harvested by 40,000 seasonal sugar workers.  Most importantly, Roll International, the company that owns Fiji, has reinvested every dollar of profit since 2004 back into the business and the island.  After all, if Fiji weren’t bottling its water, it would go to waste—unless, of course, someone provided infrastructure that piped water to villagers who need it.  However, in catastrophic situations, Fiji often does supply emergency drinking water to locals.  

Dangit, and I was so happy to disclaim Fiji water for the food-miles reason.  Now I’ve got swimming in my head ethicist Peter Singer’s argument that it’s worth making exceptions for some flown-in products, like Kenyan peas, if they provide employment for people who have few opportunities to escape poverty.  Granted, as Singer says, “I doubt that if you travel to Fiji you would find a tradition of cultivation of Fiji water,” but still, it sounds like Roll/Fiji is bottling better water than a certain Italian mineral water company, which washes and rinses bottles that weigh five times what plastic bottles weigh (correspondingly multiplying freight costs) with mineral water, so that two liters of water are used for every liter sold.  I doubt their profits are being reinvested in Italians. 

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about Fiji, although I was happy to learn that there are multiple sides to its story.  Personally, living in a city with some of the cleanest water in the world constantly available—and for free—I’ll keep drinking from the tap.