By In Midtown New York City, if you stand on the banks of the East River and look across to Queens, you’ll see a six story “Pepsi-Cola” sign, with 40 foot letters and the silhouette of a soda bottle that light up at night, advertising America’s iconic cola company, Pepsi. The sign itself has become an icon for New Yorkers and sits in a relatively quiet neighborhood park that at any given time is spotted with dog walkers, strollers and joggers enjoying the view of Manhattan.
This morning, as the sun was rising, a team of 5 activists climbed to the base of the sign’s letters to drop a massive 100 by 15 foot banner that called on Pepsi to eliminate Conflict Palm Oil from its supply chains. Today’s action is the latest escalation in a three-year campaign to pressure PepsiCo to address egregious human rights abuses and deforestation in its palm oil supply chain and commit to using only responsibly produced palm oil for all its globally branded products. While many of PepsiCo’s competitors have adopted aggressive timelines to source only responsible palm oil, PepsiCo has continued with a ‘business as usual’ timeline of 2020, positioning the company as a laggard among its peers.
Today marks a little over a week until Pepsi’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) of shareholders in North Carolina on May 4th. This is the moment to crank up the pressure on key executives that sign off on PepsiCo’s flawed business model each and every day. Will you join the activists who took action this morning by standing in solidarity with frontline communities and workers? Join the RAN activists who took action today and over 30 organizations across the globe who are showing their #solidaritywithpalmoilworkers and calling on PepsiCo to meaningfully address the exploitation of palm oil workers in its supply chain.
We’re collecting hundreds of photo petitions of activists from around the world who stand in solidarity with palm oil workers. RAN will deliver the photo petitions to PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi at the company’s shareholder meeting next week. With your photo petition, we will continue to bring our message directly to top decision-makers: PepsiCo must take meaningful action to eliminate Conflict Palm Oil and human suffering from its products now!
Take action at ran.org/solidarity today
