Protecting breastfeeding - Protecting babies fed on formula

Nestlé is in court in Switzerland on 24th and 25th January 2012 for running spies in the Swiss campaign group, ATTAC. 

We have received shocking news from the United Reformed Church (URC) Secretary for Church and Society.

Baby Milk Action recently formed the Conflict of Interest (COI) Coalition, bringing together - so far - over 140 international networks and civil society organisations calling for the United Nations to avoid conflicts of interest as it sets policies on obesity, diabetes and other Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).

The Coalition represents thousands of non-profit public health advocacy groups around the world.

Click here to download this briefing paper as a pdf file. The online version links to references.

1. Baby Milk Action recommends that people wishing to encourage baby food companies to improve their behaviour DO NOT invest in a FTSE4Good tracker as its company inclusion and assessment processes are flawed.

An article published at BioMed Central entitled What could infant and young child nutrition learn from sweatshops? concludes: "Lessons from the sweatshops debate could serve as a model to promote cooperation and trust between public and private groups, such that they learn to work together towards their common goal of improving infant and young child nutrition."

The article misses the point that campaigners are in ongoing communication with company executives. The failure of executives to abide by marketing requirements and the way they try to excuse practices and discredit critics demonstrates their focus is not on a 'common goal of improving infant and young child nutrition', but on maximising profits. They can comply with marketing requirements when forced to do so - as in Brazil and India, for example (breastfeeding rates have recovered in the former and the formula market is failing to grow in the latter) - but elsewhere violations are commonplace and it takes public pressure to stop them. There are offers on the table for meeting when companies indicate they are serious about complying with the marketing requirements. Until they do so, methods that have helped to protect the vulnerable in many countries will continue to be pursued.

I have posted the following response as a comment to the article.

It has been a busy month for Nestlé as it tries to remake the world in its own image. It culminated in Nestlé announcing "The first comprehensive nutrition system for babies", a machine that squirts out milk into feeding bottles for new borns (click here for our press release and quote). How on earth has the human race survived without there being a way to provide nutrition to its young? In Nestlé's world, the past is prelude and the fact that babies were once nurtured by milk produced by their mothers' bodies is to be consigned to our primitive past it seems. Nestlé, Good Grief!.

 Baby Milk Action will be joining partners in the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) in Geneva on 12 May to present the latest global report on baby food company marketing practices.

The Breaking the Rules, Stretching the Rules 2010 monitoring report has examples of violations from 46 countries. There are profiles of 11 leading baby food companies, with market leaders Nestlé and Danone responsible for many of the violation examples included.

Headlines claiming that scientists have produced 'breastmilk' from Genetically Modified (GM) cows should sound alarm bells for policy makers as they vote this week in the European Parliament on whether to improve measures for approving health claims on formula. Firstly, this story demonstrates once again that existing formulas lack many of the components found in breatmilk, three of which the researchers claim now to be able to produce from different GM cows. Given the existing misleading claims that formula companies put on labels, about how their formula boosts the immune system and supports brain and eye development for example, over a third of parents already believe formula is "very similar or the same" as breastmilk according to a survey by the UK Department of Health. Secondly, the GM cow's are not producing 'human breast milk' (hence the quotes in the reports), but are potentially a source of some of the missing components. Other components, some of which may still need to be discovered, and living substances, are not being produced by the cows and the milk will still require subsequent processing even if it was found to be beneficial and safe (aside from animal welfare and environmental considerations).

Get ready for another round of 'Breast not best' headlines in the UK that will echo around the world as a book by Joan Wolf, a political scientist, is launched here. It has the title: "Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood" and Joan Wolf is speaking on it at a conference on 21 March.

Well, today we were alerted by a member, Anne Adamson, to a promotion of Nescafe - right outside our office in Cambridge.  

We went downstairs with a couple of placards and some leaflets.

As we prepared to take some pictures the group leader kept moving the promotion further and further down the street,  threatening to sue us  if we showed his face in our picture.  

One of the activities in our Make a Mark in 2010 initiative was to develop an online training course on monitoring the baby food industry.

The technology has been put in place and the first module has now been made live on our website. Further modules in the 8-module course will be added over the coming months.

Q and A with Mike Brady

The Mumsnet parenting website invited their followers to post questions to be answered by Mike Brady, Campaigns and Networking Coordinator at Baby Milk Action, and the moderators selected the following as representative.

Edited versions of these answers have been posted on the Mumsnet site - full answers are given here.

Browse the questions selected by Mumsnet below and click on the links to go straight to Mike Brady's full answer.

A senior member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) responsible for the UN Global Compact has moved to Nestlé as Vice President for Corporate Affairs. The Global Compact is a voluntary initiative aiming to persuade corporations to abide by a set of Principles on human rights and the environment. Baby Milk Action and other Nestlé Critics filed complaints with the UN Global Compact Office in 2009 under so-called Integrity Measures alleging egregious violations of the Global Compact Principles, but the Office refused to investigate these. Despite the complaint about Nestlé's aggressive marketing of baby food in violation of international standards and other on-going concerns, the Global Compact Office accepted Nestlé as a patron sponsor of its 10th anniversary summit in New York in July 2010 (see press release UN Global Compact - 10 years of helping cover up corporate malpractice). Now it has been reported that the WHO officer responsible for promoting industry alliances with the UN Global Compact moved to Nestlé in October 2010 to take up a position as Vice President. While this is a worrying indication of the close relationship between the UN Global Compact staff and industry, Baby Milk Action is calling on Nestlé newest Vice President, Janet Voûte, to use her position to try to stop her new colleagues violating the Global Compact principles.

It is International Nestlé-Free Week at the end of October. Our press release can be found at:

http://info.babymilkaction.org/pressrelease/pressrelease10oct10

I saw a comment on one discussion board where someone had posted a link: "sorry .. but some people cant breast feed .. so making people feel guilty because they cant .. no thanks ..."

I posted the following comment:

The UN Secretary General, Ban KI-moon, is today announcing a worldwide campaign to save the lives of 16 million mothers and children over the next five years and a fund of US$40 billion to help achieve this goal. See The Guardian.

This is wonderful news - and we should perhaps not be too surprised to find that Nestlé, a company with a long record of abusing women and child rights, is trying to muscle in on the initiative to try to distract attention from its on-going aggressive marketing of baby milks in breach of international standards and other much-criticised practices.

Far too many mothers and children die from preventable causes. While we welcome the new United Nations initiative, we should also remember that there are far cheaper, but politically more difficult, steps that can be taken to reduce unnecessary child deaths: implementing and enforcing existing measures adopted by the United Nations. Over 140,000 people have signed a rolling petition calling for policy makers to take action to protect, promote and support breastfeeding, with over 3,000 addressing a specific message to the Secretary General over the last three days. See the ONE MILLION CAMPAIGN.

In the area of infant feeding, the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes is helping to save lives in many countries, but many more have yet to implement it and the subsequent, relevant Resolutions of the World Health Assembly. These international minimum standards aim to protect breastfeeding and ensure breastmilk substitutes are used safely when necessary and companies are called on to abide by them independently of government action, but do not do so.

Worse still, the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary initiative intended to improve the behaviour of transnational corporations, has been found to be complicit in working with companies such as Nestlé to allow violations of the Code and Resolutions to continue: it accepts Nestlé funding to promote the initiative and posts on its website Nestlé's PR materials claiming the company abides by the Code and Resolution, but refuses to investigate reports of egregious violations of the Global Compact Principles registered under the initiatives Integrity Measures. There are also concerns that corporations will be using the UN Secretary General's new initiative as a way to improve their images, while continuing to abuse human rights. 

A MESSAGE FROM THE ONE MILLION CAMPAIGN

Dear Friend,

Globally 3.6 million Infants die before they reach their first birthday and millions are malnourished because of inadequate and inappropriate breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices.

Most effective interventions to save babies’ lives and prevent malnutrition is to enhance early and exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, and good complementary feeding thereafter along with continued breastfeeding.  For this, women needed to be supported.

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki- moon will launch the Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health at a special event during the MDG Summit in New York on 22nd  September.

Let's call upon the UN Secretary General to ensure support to women. 

The newly formed coalition Government in the UK has prioritised cutting public expenditure and the deficit and has also launched a campaign to scrap or amend unnecessary or ineffective legislation. The public are being invited to submit suggestions. 

Baby Milk Action is suggesting the Government simplify the Infant Formula and Follow-on Formula Regulations. Currently advertising and promotion of infant formula is prohibited, but follow-on formula can be advertised, a double standard with financial and health implications. In addition, the information on infant formula is regulated, but companies can make claims about health benefits on follow-on formula labels with impunity. Bringing follow-on formula within the same restrictions as infant formula will protect breastfeeding and babies fed on formula.  You can support this suggestion by clicking on the 5th star under the heading 'Add a Rating' and leaving comments on the Government website - click here.

Nestlé is promoting its breastmilk substitutes with the claim they are, 'The new "Gold Standard" in infant nutrition' (June 2010). What does Paul the psychic octopus, who predicted the World Cup winners, think is the real gold standard?

Image by a supporter of Baby Milk Action's 'email Nestle' campaign: http://info.babymilkaction.org/emailnestle

Media coverage: Ekklesia 1 July 2010

We have just learned that the forthcoming Assembly of the United Reformed Church (4 July) presents an ideal opportunity to put pressure on Nestlé to stop its systematic violations of the World Health Assembly's marketing requirements for baby foods. If you will be attending the Assembly, please look at the up-to-date information in this site, particularly concerning Nestlé's current global baby milk marketing scam. Nestlé is claiming its baby milk 'protects' babies even though it knows babies fed on it are more likely to become sick than breastfed babies and, in conditions of poverty, more likely to die. Contact me if you would like to discuss this further. Nestlé puts its profits before all else and the changes we have compelled it to make have come from exposure, and the public backing the boycott and telling Nestlé they are doing so.

The Nestlé boycott works its magic again as sponsorship of the BlogHer conference by its Stouffer brand comes under scrutiny. The Conference is due to take place in New York in the United States (6 - 7 August). Ironically, this came to my attention by a posting on a blog by someone defending her decision to attend Nestlé's parenting-blogger event in California in October 2009, which led to a first-class public relations disaster on Twitter, the social networking site. Nestlé has an abysmal image in cyberspace and is trying to improve this. As debate rages over whether bloggers should attend the Conference and what they can do there to support the campaign if they do, some thoughts come to my mind, which I will share here. It is very welcome to see people taking a stand, but the fact that Nestlé is contributing to the unnecessary death and suffering of babies around the world is an uncomfortable fact to face if you are someone who loves a particular product or want to accept its largesse. Accordingly, facing the facts is generally avoided in the arguments for not taking a stand.

Nestle held a Forum in London today 27 May - broadcast on the internet - about its Creating Shared Value strategy. Nestle portrays itself as a model of ethical behaviour, driven by its values. Yet the claims it makes and reports it produces are very misleading. Baby Milk Action's questions were not posted to the discussion board - read them here.

Greenpeace is reporting that Nestlé has agreed to all of its demands regarding its sourcing of palm oil from suppliers accused of destroying Indonesian rainforest to produce it. Nestlé had earlier resisted calls to change its policies and practices and received many thousands of messages and Greenpeace campaigners dropped in - literally - on its shareholder meeting in Switzerland last April. Now it is saying it will source palm oil from sustainable sources by 2015. This will require careful monitoring; when Nestlé was targeted over child slavery in its cocoa supply chain it promised in 2001 to ensure this had ended within 5 years, but has still not delivered. From our own success in holding Nestlé to account, we know that its Public Relations team will be swinging into action to portray this as 'Nestlé taking the lead' - ignoring the great efforts campaigners have had to go to and using its climb down to divert attention from other concerns about it awful management behaviour.

Nestlé is the most boycotted company in the UK over the way it pushes baby milk and it is desperate to change the situation. It is reportedly paying celebrities US$10,000 per tweet to say nice things about it on Twitter and is hiring a PR firm to try to improve its image in cyberspace. Today it is sponsoring the London Marathon and is supplying branded Nestlé Pure Life water to runners around the course. We have produced leaflets for runners and others to hand out to use this as an opportunity to show they do not support Nestlé and have produced a press release including the following quote.

We have a boycott list with the main Nestlé brands in the UK. I was just adding a note that Nestlé is in the process of selling its Alcon contact lens solutions business to Novartis. This is due to complete in mid-2010. In the process I remembered I needed to update the link to Nestlé own brands page. We link to it from our boycott list, but Nestlé keeps changing the address of the page in small ways so the link dies (for example, its been changed from Brands.htm to BrandHome.htm). Thank you to everyone who contacted me about the dead link.

You can find our list with the link to Nestlé's latest page at
http://info.babymilkaction.org/nestleboycottlist

The game of 'find the Nestlé's brand page' is not the only one Nestlé likes to play. A new one surfaced when I visited the Annabel Karmel Facebook page today. Unsurprising as it was recruiting PR experts to try to improve its abysmal image in cyberspace. See:
http://boycottnestle.blogspot.com/2010/02/nestle-launches-cyberwar.html 

A investigative television programme on Channel 4's Dispatches in the UK is reporting on how corporate lobbyists recruit politicians to gain access to Government Ministers and the Chairs of influential Parliamentary committees.

This is the text of a talk I gave to the La Leche League Ireland Conference on 7 March 2010. The accompanying PowerPoint presentation is attached (see link at the foot of the page).

Mr Tom Levitt, Member of Parliament for Buxton, has announced he is standing down at the next election.

Nestlé bottles Buxton water in the town and has befriended its MP with free tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and a free trip to South Africa.

After the trip, Mr. Levitt praised Nestlé and suggested it should no longer be criticised for issues he said were 30 years in the past. In the Buxton Advertiser today, he is again quoted defending his friends at Nestlé:
http://www.buxtonadvertiser.co.uk/news/MP-Tom-denies-Nestle-job.6108297.jp