Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization

5 The All-Consuming Network

5 The All-Consuming Network The Politics of Protest in an Age of Consumption According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, over 4,000 babies die every day because they are not breast-fed. This amounts to approximately 1.5 million every year or one infant mortality every thirty seconds. The nature of the problem, as argued by a number of campaigning organizations such as Baby Milk Action, La Leche League, and the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, is now reasonably familiar. Multinational corporations have promoted infant formulas and alternatives to mother’s milk, which are either less nutritious or downright dangerous. Particularly in areas where water is unsafe, it is claimed that babies are up to twenty-five times more likely to die if bottle fed, either because dirty water is added to the milk formula or because bottles and teats are not sterilized. Infections lead to diarrhea and death, while the money spent on the formulas further reduces family incomes encouraging mothers to dilute the product more than recommended ensuring the child—and possibly its siblings—are malnourished. Even where adequate clear water supplies are assured, it is claimed that manufactured products cannot compete with the quality of breast milk. Several NGOs argue that in countries such as the UK bottle-fed babies are ten times more likely to be hospitalized with gastrointestinal illness and that breast-fed babies are less likely to die of cot death or suffer from allergies.1 Many of these claims are undoubtedly disputed, but the core problem of the inappropriate use of breast milk alternatives has persisted over the decades. The starting point for the current movement stretches back prior to World War II when the pediatrician Dr. Cicely Williams began campaigning in Malaya against manufacturers of canned and dried milk. In 1939, she addressed the Singapore Rotary Club with her speech “Milk and Murder,” a stirring defense of breast milk over bottled milk that continues to inspire milk activists to this day.2 What is significant about the defense of breast milk is the more confrontational stance against the milk formula industry taken by activists and the sheer number of NGOs involved in high profile campaigns, particularly the boycott of Nestlé, which has now existed for over thirty years. Opponents of bottled milk have been angered over industry practices such as the dressing of sales staff as nurses and the unsubstantiated claims made of the nutritional benefits of infant formulas. But the promoters of breast milk include not only the critics of multinational capitalist enterprise; they also consist of public health workers, environmentalists, women’s groups, consumers, feminists, and conservative reactionaries who have sought to use breast-feeding as a means to extol the virtues of mothering. It is this combination of a variety of groups and individuals from across the political spectrum that makes the campaign against breast milk substitutes indicative of trends in global civil society. The Nestlé boycott may have involved organizations specifically established to campaign against infant formula, and to some extent it mobilized sufficient sections of the population to suggest it represented a new social movement in the manner of environmentalism and feminism. But it was also marked by the coming together of pre-existing institutions prepared to unite on a specific issue. They did this through the construction of a transnational network administered and co-ordinated by the global consumer movement. Whereas previously global civil society had been characterized by the campaigns of general issue federations—of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the consumer movement, and so on—since the late 1970s these groups increasingly worked together in less formal networks and coalitions, which allowed them to pool their resources and respond quickly to perceived specific failings of the market. The networks override any more fundamental and political differences that might exist within different branches of the NGO community and constitute an agreement by diverse entities to set aside their more general agendas in order to focus specifically on one particular problem. The campaigns that have arisen against the use of pesticides or the dumping of pharmaceutical products on unregulated Third World markets have not been regarded as first steps in a wider set of co-ordinated reforms. They have been seen as ends in themselves, the members of the network accepting that the network should disband and that each should go their own separate way once a particular problem has been resolved. This focus on networking has certainly attracted a...