BOYCOTTING NESTLE?
The campaign to boycott infant formula makers Nestle gained publicity when comedians Emma Thompson and Rob Newman withdrew from Perrier (owned by Nestle) awards for comedy at the Edinburgh festival. The campaign alleges that infant formula milk is being promoted in the third world despite the threat to children's health.
The image of Nestle as a predatory capitalist multi-national is enhanced by its extensive holdings in Africa and Asia, where the group employs one quarter of its 231 000 employees, that helped boost profits in 1999 by 12 per cent - even though its capital expenditure in those regions fell due to 'streamlining'. Ironically, though, the campaign against Nestle attacks the most positive thing that the company does: produce infant formula milk, increasingly for sale in the third world.
The campaign against infant formula milk was initially addressed to mothers in the developed world. Scare stories abounded, from the Lancet's alleged correlation between 'human milk [and] neuro- development' (31 January 1991) to the Ministry of Agriculture Farming and Fisheries discovery of minute amounts of phthalates in infant formula (March 1996). Despite the intensive efforts of the National Health Service to promote breastfeeding, British mothers doing so reduce from 64 per cent at birth to just 39 per cent after six weeks.
What is true is that breast milk is marginally better for the health of small babies. But what provokes the Nestle boycotters is that many mothers balance that advantage against the need to earn money, or their own comfort. Unable to persuade working mums in Britain, campaigners turned their attention to the Third World.
Henri Nestle started producing infant formula in Switzerland in the 1860s, founding a food company that went international as early as 1907, and dominated the world's instant coffee market after the Second World War. The high value of the Swiss Franc and climbing coffee prices in the 1970s, though, led to the most recent push to market infant formula in Africa and Asia.
Campaigners, supported by Unicef, allege that infant formula is particularly bad for the third world because poor water supplies will poison infants - as if purchasers were incapable of boiling water. Underlying the campaign though, is a prejudice that African and Asian mothers ought be somehow 'closer to nature', meaning generally at home looking after the children. Nestle is no doubt exploiting third world labour, but the availability of infant formula to mothers throughout the world is a positive advantage that only reactionaries would attack.
-- James Heartfield