Nestle Boycott: The Sequel

As you might recall, in the late 1970s and early '80s, a broad international coalition of church, health-care, and community groups waged a 7-year-long campaign against Nestle S.A., the Swiss-based transnational food products giant. That boycott was aimed at stopping Nestle's promotion of infant formula in the Third World.

The boycotters' case was simple and morally irrefutable. Throughout the Third World, Nestle, and other formula manufacturers, were handing out free formula samples to new mothers. This practice, along with other high-pressure sales techniques, was intended to persuade mothers to replace their own safe and healthy breast milk with the more expensive, complicated option of bottle feeding.

The problems came when the free samples dried up. By then the mothers' milk had, too. Then the formula was often improperly prepared by parents who couldn't read the instructions, or over-diluted to stretch the supply, or mixed with unsanitary water. The result was malnutrition, diarrhea, and death as thousands of infants gave their lives for an international marketing strategy.

The Nestle boycott ended in 1984 when the company agreed to all of the boycotters' demands. It seemed that a persistent David had conquered the chocolate Goliath. But now the Nestle boycott is back. A year ago this month some of the same organizers who announced the victory in 1984 held another press conference to announce that Nestle has broken its promises. Specifically, the boycott organization has documented the fact that Nestle continues to donate wholesale quantities of free formula to hospitals and maternity clinics for distribution to new mothers.

This practice has continued despite every national and international effort to stop it. Nestle has exploited every conceivable loophole in the World Health Organization (WHO) code on formula marketing. At first the formula "donations" continued under the cover of a code exception aimed at exempting orphanages. Now Nestle claims that its "gifts" of formula are only for the use of that tiny minority of mothers who are unable to breast-feed.

But last year investigators from the boycott organization returned from a tour of the developing world with photographs and videotape of clinic storerooms stuffed to the brim with cases of free formula. They also brought back graphic footage of tortured infants dying from the "bottle-baby disease."

So in this age of endless sequels, we now have Boycott II: The Return of David and Goliath. And like all good sequels, this one has an extra added attraction in the form of a new villain. In their investigations the formula activists discovered that another of the world's worst formula abusers is the U.S.-based American Home Products, Inc. So now AHP is on the list as well.

As the new boycott picks up steam, there are some important lessons to be learned from the failure of the 1984 agreement that ended the first Nestle boycott. These are mostly lessons about the intractable nature of transnational corporate power. While the first boycott ended with apparent success, it was weakened in its last stages when some church and labor organizations dropped out in the wake of Nestle's unilateral promises to abide by the WHO code. The agreement with Nestle lacked any significant enforcement mechanisms and depended too much upon the company's good intentions, which are worse than limited.

Of course, there are also severe limits on the ability of any citizens organization, or even any national government, to rein in the power of a company such as Nestle. With its base in Switzerland and its markets wherever people eat, the company is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. And with $25 billion in gross annual revenue, its warchest is almost unlimited.

THAT KIND OF CORPORATE POWER is ultimately what this boycott is about. And that is not just a Third World issue. One case in point involves one of Nestle's wholly-owned U.S. subsidiaries -- Beechnut Nutrition Inc. Beechnut makes baby food. You may recall that a few years back Beechnut was caught selling "apple juice" which it claimed was 100 percent pure with no chemicals and no added sugar. It turned out that the concoction contained not a drop of real apple juice and was nothing but chemicals and added sugar.

Nestle is already using the considerable political and financial power at its disposal to counter Boycott II. One of the prime instruments of Nestle's counter-boycott strategy is again the "independent" Nestle Infant Formula Audit Commission, chaired by former Sen. Edmund Muskie, a prominent liberal in his heyday. This commission is entirely funded by Nestle, and Nestle's public relations people handle the dissemination of its periodic pronouncements that all is well in the infant formula industry.

Muskie, you may recall, served briefly as secretary of state in the Carter administration. He took the post after Cyrus Vance resigned on principle over the attempted military rescue of the hostages in Iran. Obviously, Muskie's principles remain flexible, as do those of his colleague, Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell. In civilian life, Powell heads the Washington, D.C. office of the ultra-elite public relations firm Ogilvy and Mather.

For Nestle, Ogilvy and Mather produced a game plan titled "Proactive Neutralization: Nestle Recommendations Regarding Infant Formula Boycott." Despite the title, which echoes spy jargon for assassinations, the plan is mainly focused on "warm and fuzzy" public service tactics, especially aimed at school children, to build Nestle's positive image rating. But it also includes a sinister recommendation "to initiate an early warning system [to gain] awareness of actions being planned," jargon that seems to mean only one thing: infiltration of the boycott organization. Nestle now says that the plan has been rejected.

In the long run, cracking the power of Nestle, or of its transnational counterparts in other industries, will require grassroots alliances of shared interest among workers, consumers, and communities in different parts of the world. The Nestle boycott should be viewed as one embryonic experiment in building those alliances.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.