Consumer Affairs

The Nestle Boycott

By Karen Bynum

March 1979

Historical March 1979 opinion column by Karen Bynum. The author’s claims, racial terminology, figures, product list and campaign contacts are reproduced as period reporting, not current medical guidance or present-day company information.

The huge multi-national corporations of our world have never been famous for making decisions based on compassion or brotherly love. When a choice is offered between people and profit, they consistently choose profit. This practice is generally known as exploitation. And it matters not if the “people” involved are infants. If they happen to be black, brown or yellow infants (children of the Third World) they are simply easier prey because their mothers are uneducated and unsophisticated.

Throughout the Third World, from Haiti to Venezuela, from Nigeria to the Philippines, new mothers are leaving maternity wards with tins of powdered infant formula — free samples — supplied by multi-national companies based in the U.S., Japan, and Switzerland.

They go home. They open the tins. They try to reconstitute the formula. Without clean water. Without a suitable pot for sterilizing. Without enough fuel to boil their one bottle and nipple before each feeding. Without a refrigerator to store even a single day’s supply of formula. Their free tins run out. Their breast milk by now has dried up. Now they must use the formula. But when they discover that it costs nearly half of all the money their families earn, they try to stretch it. They thin it down with water, tea, cocoa, to make a three-day supply stretch out to a week, two weeks, even three.

Their babies are burning with fever, dehydrated and suffering from acute diarrhea. They are weakened by lack of nourishment, infected by poisonous bacteria, susceptible to disease.

Ten million Third World babies are starving. Some will be unhealthy the rest of their lives. Others will be mentally retarded. Most will die.

The baby bottle problem really began in the late ‘sixties. By then it had become clear that the U.S. birth rate was heading for an all-time low. Figures from Europe told the same story. Infant product-oriented businesses throughout the developed world knew they had to find new markets.

Companies like Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Meyers, American Home Products and – biggest of all — the Swiss-based Nestle Company expanded rapidly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The airwaves and billboards were filled with advertising slogans. They gave women the idea that breastfeeding was “primitive,” “unscientific,” and “inconvenient.”

Then these companies went their advertising one better. They started giving away free samples, pamphlets, posters, and contributions of equipment directly to hospitals. They gave special services to doctors and nurses. They sponsored conferences for them.

Finally, some promotion genius dreamed up the idea of “milk nurses.” Dressed in nurse-like uniforms, these women travel around countries like Malaysia and the Philippines visiting new mothers, providing gifts and advice, weighing the babies — and leaving samples of powdered baby formula.

The “milk nurse” may or may not be a real nurse. She wasn’t hired to work as a nurse, she was hired to look like a nurse and promote infant formula — to exploit every mother’s desire to do what’s best for her baby.

The infant formula peddlers are protecting a billion dollars a year in sales to Third World countries; moreover, there are no laws preventing them from doing irreparable harm to millions of babies.

The Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) is an assembly of nutritionists, educators, church and women’s groups representatives throughout America. Their purpose is to halt the unethical and dangerous (the word evil comes to mind) promotion of infant milk formula in Third World countries, through widespread public education and generation of grass-roots pressure against the offending corporations.

The most urgent project right now is a nationwide boycott of the products of the Nestle Company — the Swiss-based conglomerate which is the biggest offender by far.

In the past year, public pressure has succeeded in forcing Bristol Meyers, Abbott Laboratories, and others to curtail their mass media advertising and their use of “milk nurse” sales personnel. But Nestle’s profit-hungry baby products division continues to send “milk nurses” to the homes of new mothers, hawks its products from magazine pages and transistor radios, supplies doctors and clinics with truckloads of free samples, urging them to get new mothers started on the formula from day one.

The Nestle Company is the biggest food processor in the world. Its corporate policies are set in its international headquarters in Switzerland — beyond the influence of the U.S. government. The only way to get Nestle’s attention is to hit them in the pocketbook. The greatest hope for success rests with you and the millions of other concerned Americans whose participation in the boycott will force Nestle to listen and act at last!

Three things you can do today:

1) Don’t buy Nestle’s products! Clip out the coupon below and carry it to the grocery store with you. The “Nestle” name may not appear on all products and it is a long list.

2) Make noise where it counts! Write Mr. David Guerrant, President, the Nestle Company, Inc., 100 Bloomingdale Road, White Plains, N.Y. 10605, to let him know you have joined the boycott.

For 31¢ postage you can write to Mr. Arthur Fürer, Managing Director, Nestle S. A., Vevey, Switzerland, and let him know you won’t buy Nestle products until the exploitation of Third World babies is halted.

(Nestle has already expanded its public relations department to handle such correspondence, so you can expect to receive an elaborate, self-serving reply.)

Write to your Congressman, Senators, and Ambassador Andrew Young at the United Nations, asking for further investigation of baby formula sales practices that might lead to new regulation.

3) Join the Infant Formula Action Coalition! INFACT, 1701 University Avenue S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55414, needs monetary support to reach more people to join the boycott, to monitor developments in Third World countries, to collect and present evidence.

In closing, we would like to quote Cesar Chavez, United Farm Workers of America, “We have always assumed that corporations must take seriously the needs of society, especially the needs of the poor. History will judge corporations and other social institutions, not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and powerful; but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the … helpless.”