Nestles Boycott

Baby Milk Action, and others in 19 countries, called for a boycott on all Nestles products a long time ago in protest of the company's aggressive, murderous, marketing of formula baby food over natural mothers milk in poor countries. This is directly against the WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breast milk Substitutes drawn up in 1981.

• Nestlés provide free milk and other inducements to maternity hospitals in the Third World so that newborn babies are routinely bottle-fed.
  
• When newborn babies are given bottles, they are less able to suckle well. This makes breastfeeding failure likely. The baby is then dependent on artificial milk.
  
• The milk is free to the mothers while they are in hospital. When the mother and baby leave hospital, the milk is no longer free. At home parents are forced to buy more milk, which can cost 50% of the family income.
  
• Because the milk is so expensive the child is not fed enough. This leads to malnutrition.
  
• The water mixed with the formula is often contaminated. This leads to diarrhoea, malnutrition and often death. James Grant, Executive Officer of UNICEF, has said: Every day some 3,000 to 4,000 infants die because they are denied access to adequate breast milk.
  
• The instructions on mixing the formula are not written in a language understood by the mothers.
  

These babies are twins. Their Pakistani mother was wrongly advised that she would not have enough breast milk to feed both and so bottle-fed her daughter while breastfeeding her son. The girl died the day after this photo was taken in Islamabad Children's Hospital. 'Use my picture, ' said the mother, 'if it will help others not to make the same mistake.'   (photo, left)

Does a Boycott Change Anything?

While many people are sympathetic to the reason behind a boycott, not enough join in. One of the main reasons (according to my subjective perceptions) is that people do not see their actions as having any results. This may be partly due to only concentrating on what happens to the primary target of a boycott.

Lets look at my friend Fred making a decision about whether to buy Nescafe (the coffee brand from Nestle).

He is convinced that Nestle are causing unnecessary suffering and that this is deplorable  - this is the easy step.

He doesn't think that they will change their policy just because he buys Maxwell House six times per year instead of Nescafe.

Well, there's not much that I can say to him on that score, because he probably right!

However, lets take a longer term view.

By refusing to buy Nescafe, Fred will also have to discuss the issue with anyone else who shares the shopping with him.

He may choose a brand from a much smaller company. The positive effect to this smaller company is much larger than the negative effect to Nestle. The new company may find out that many people are switching to it on ethical grounds and position itself in the market to take advantage of this by, for example, publishing a code of conduct.

Having switched brand once, Fred now has less brand loyalty. A newly formed Fairtrade or Ethically sound company will know this by market research and will know that they have a better chance of success in the coffee sector.

Another coffee company which has the chance of entering the baby milk industry (this is where Nestle is most harmful), may decline to do so (or may do so in a responsible way) because in their standard business analysis, they see the risk of a boycott as real. It is much, much easier not to adopt a harmful policy when you are not the target of a boycott that to change a policy under pressure.

Submitted by Cyn

The details about the activities of Nestlés and the boycott came from various sources if you would like to know more try these websites
http://www.babymilkaction.org/
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~stu/shopper1.htm
Http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/nestle.html