Gulliver

Mosaic, a mining and fertilizer company headquartered in Tampa, Florida, was created by a 2004 merger between IMC Global, and Cargill’s crop nutrition division. Historically IMC Global was the largest producer of phosphate in the U.S. that it mines in the Peace river basin of southwestern Florida leaving behind a highly acidic wastewater and phosphogypsum, a low level radioactive solid waste that it dumps in mountainous piles called ‘gypstacks' that can reach 500 feet tall (152 meters) or more. The phosphate rock is shipped to Louisiana where it is turned into fertilizer at the Faustina and Uncle Sam fertilizer plants in St. James Parish, which lies in an industrial zone that activists have named Cancer Alley. The fertilizer plants yield yet more phosphogypsum waste that is also piled into gypstacks. In 2004, Mosaic’s Riverview gypstack discharged 65 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into Hillsborough Bay, Florida; and in 2016 Mosaic’s New Wales gypstack released 215 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Floridian aquifer, a drinking water source for 10 million people. In 2018, the 200 foot (60 meter) high gypstack at the Uncle Sam plant was found to be gradually collapsing, threatening the Blind River watershed and the Maurepas Swamp.
 

Nestlé is a multinational processed foods company that manufactures products like KitKat, Nespresso and Perrier. In 2021, it acknowledged that 60 percent of its food portfolio was unhealthy. It has been sued in the U.S for buying cocoa from suppliers in West Africa linked to child and slave labor.  (The case was rejected for lack of jurisdiction.)

The company came under fire in the 1970’s for aggressively marketing infant formula to mothers in the Global South, that was linked to hundreds of thousands of infant deaths. This is because baby formula is only safe if it is prepared with clean water, stored in sterilized bottles and refrigerated, but many of the mothers pressured into using the formula did not have the financial resources to do so.

NextEra Energy, formerly Florida Power and Light, is a Florida-based utility company with operations in Canada and the U.S. Despite being sometimes described as the “greenest energy giant” in the U.S., it generates almost three quarters of its power from natural gas and nuclear. It has used dirty tricks to stop Florida residents from installing rooftop solar in order to preserve its monopoly on electricity in the state. The tricks included coordinating “ghost” candidates during elections, spying on a journalist and taking over a local newspaper, according to leaked documents obtained by Floodlight and the Orlando Sentinel in 2022. 

NextEra is also one of the owners of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 300 mile (483 kilometer) natural gas pipeline that stretches from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. The pipeline would cut through the homes of low-income, Black, and Indigenous people, turning their land into a “sacrifice zone”, which is why they have strongly resisted the project. Construction on the pipeline began in 2018 but has faced legal hurdles due to its environmental impacts, including facing over 450 water-quality-related violations in Virginia and West Virginia.
 

Occidental Petroleum is a fossil fuel company headquartered in Houston, Texas, although it was based in Los Angeles for most of its history. It incorporates the assets of Andarko Petroleum from Texas and Kerr-McGee from Oklahoma, both of which were major fossil companies in their time. In Colombia, the U’wa Indigenous peoples successfully campaigned to force Occidental from drilling on their lands and to sell its concession to Ecopetrol. Occidental continues to operate the 780 kilometer long Caño Limón pipeline in Colombia to the port of Coveñas which has contaminated the Arauca, Capanaparo and Cinaruco rivers. It has been sued for providing military equipment to Colombian army used to massacre union members along the pipeline route. In Peru, Occidental has agreed to a confidential settlement in 2013 with the Achuar Indigenous community for 30 years of contaminating the Corrientes River basin.