Breastfeeding is an essential source of nourishment for millions of infants worldwide.
Breastfeeding is an essential source of nourishment for millions of infants worldwide. Breast milk contains require nutrients that can help prevent infections and malnutrition. Mother’s milk is safe, free, and renewable. However, in the last several decades, breast milk has had to compete with the rapidly growing market of breast milk substitutes – baby formula. As consumers, we trust that the producers of breast milk substitutes make it their number one priority to protect infant health. However, the news that infant formula posed a danger to infants may come as a surprise to many. In the mid 1970s, Nestle (a Swiss multinational) the number one producer of breast milk substitutes was attacked for aggressively marketing baby formula in developing countries.
The story of the Nestle Baby Formula Controversy begins almost three decades ago with the publication of a pamphlet called ‘The Baby Killer’ in 1974 by Mike Muller and War on Want, a London-based activist group concerned with problems of the Third World (Akhter 1994). The pamphlet claimed that Third World babies were dying because their mothers were feeding them infant formula that was being marketed by multinationals such a Nestle of Switzerland (Akhter 1994). The pamphlet claimed that the infant deaths were due to irresponsible marketing of infant formula, especially the “use of medically unqualified sales girls, the distribution of free samples, and the association of bottle-feeding with healthy babies to promote the use of infant formula by mothers” who should have been breast-feeding their babies rather than bottle-feeding them (Akhter 1994). Before The Baby Killer was published, the issue of marketing baby formula to underdeveloped countries received very little public attention. However, the pamphlet raised public awareness and in 1974 the Third World Action Group, TWAG, translated the pamphlet into German and republished it under the new title, ‘Nestle Kills Babies’ (Akhter 1994).