The Church Of England’s Nestle Problem

It has been estimated that 10.5 million babies have died worldwide as a result of formula companies using aggressive marketing policies.

When I was studying in the 1990s, Nestle products were banned from campus. Indeed, many individuals and organisations chose to boycott them, including the Church of England Synod, which voted to support the action in 1991.

It had a measurable effect. In 1992 Nescafé sales fell by 3%. In 1993 Nestlé increased its Nescafé advertising spend by 75% to 14 million pounds, but their profits continued to be hit. And while Nestlé attacked the boycott as being a threat to jobs, no one was dismissed: indeed, jobs may even have been created in advertising, as Nestlé tried to regain market share. In 1994 there was a move by the Oxford Diocese for the Church to sell its Nestlé shares. Nestlé went into overdrive, making statements at the Synod meeting that were demonstrably untrue and denounced not just by the pressure group Baby Milk Action, but by development agency experts. The result was that the Synod voted to end the boycott in a vote of 180 to 168. Something to bear in mind the next time that the Church boasts of its ethical credentials, you might think.

Still, boycott or not, would you be surprised to learn that Church House, owned by the Corporation of Church House and used as headquarters for the Church of England, was sub-letting some of the space to Nestle even as it very publicly sells shares in Shell as part of a thrust for a better world?

I was astonished. So much so that I set about some research to discover if Nestle were still as bad as I remember from my university days, when they were called ‘baby killers’ and no self-respecting student could be seen with a KitKat.

They are. They are still bad, and no amount of PR and eco-washing seems to have changed that. The persistent claims around child slavery, deforestation and union breaking are not unique to Nestle. Much of the cocoa grown for Nestle chocolate is grown illegally in national parks and other protected areas, and harvested by children as young as nine, using machetes, susceptible to snake bites, with no hope of an education or a future. Well,  most big companies use similar methods and destroy the planet while they do it too. That’s capitalism.

But Nestle is unique in its aggressive selling of baby formula.

Not in the UK, where they possess only a small market share, around 14%, leaving most of it to Danone. Currently, Nestle prefers to concentrate their efforts on the Far East, paying doctors and nurses more than their annual salary to promote their product. Mothers tend to believe doctors who claim formula is the healthiest way to feed their babies, the way of the educated rich; that perhaps their diet means they don’t have every requisite vitamin in their milk. They try the formula, their own milk dries up, and then they are forced to buy formula, at hugely elevated prices, to try to keep their babies alive.

Whenever there’s some big disaster Nestle attaches itself to charities, getting people to pay to donate formula. Giving this product, in tins with instructions written in the wrong language, to people who don’t have clean water or reliable fuel for boiling, and who have a perfectly clean, safe supply of food for their babies in their breasts, provided they’re fed themselves, is tantamount to a death sentence.

Nestle have grown frustrated with their inability to push these arguments convincingly in the West, where it’s increasingly evident that breast milk is better for mother and baby both, free, perfectly attuned to each individual child’s needs, convenient, requiring no sterilisation or equipment. Efforts to twist arguments around gender equality rather backfired when women continued to be responsible for feeding their children, but also for looking after sickly children when their formula causes tummy upsets and lowers immunity. So formula companies bring out more pointless products, like the 12-month+ formulas, suggesting that a child not eating every vegetable will find it beneficial. They won’t.

Then Nestle and their ilk put out press releases which say, Isn’t it awful how we make mothers feel guilty when they’re just doing their best? But who makes them feel guilty, really?  99% of babies in the UK receive some formula before they turn six months, so one wonders who makes that 99% feel guilty. ‘Fed is best’, they say, a slogan invented by formula companies, as indeed was ‘breast is best’, meaning breast is best but formula is good enough. Which it isn’t. When research is published claiming that breastfed babies do better at school, or are less likely to get respiratory infections or gastrointestinal infections, up pop the formula companies, masquerading as mother’s pressure groups, saying, you brutes, why, why must you make women feel guilty? Oddly, they don’t object so virulently to the posters in every doctor’s waiting room, saying if your child eats sugar they will become obese, get heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and die prematurely. That kind of maternal pressure is perfectly acceptable.

Baby Milk Action claims that globally, 1.5 million babies die each year because they are not breastfed.  They die from diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, often because they haven’t a clean drinking source. The formula companies like to claim they support orphans and mothers with HIV who might otherwise transmit the disease to their child, but they sell vastly more tins of formula than there are HIV-positive mothers and orphans.

Do churches have a moral obligation to ensure they do not benefit from suffering? I think they do. To move from boycotting a company to profiting from it in the space of 30 years strikes me as deeply suspect.

 Capitalism functions on the premise that someone, somewhere must be exploited. Usually, companies run out of people to exploit. Nestle have sidestepped this problem by hoodwinking some of the most vulnerable people on the planet and exploiting them to death. That’s on their conscience. But it shouldn’t be on the Church’s conscience too.