This article in the Guardian made depressing reading for me today. It seems that the 30-year boycott of Nestle has done little good, and the doctors in Bangladesh are fighting a losing battle against the baby milk giants.
This depressed me for two reasons. The first should be obvious. For the sake of £2 per family per week, a corporation selling formula milk for babies is willing to take a third of their wages. A third. Most families earn around £6 per week in the area the journalist visited. Because they are encouraged to bottlefeed their babies, they must spend £2 of that on formula milk. Because it is so expensive, they ration the milk - watering it down to make it go further. The babies get diarrhoea, and mortality is frighteningly high.
The second reason is more insidious, but no less depressing. My university used to boycott Nestle. Ten years ago there were signs in the Students' Union explaining why they did not sell Polos. They did not sell Polos (or any other Nestle product) because of the boycott. Eight years ago the students took a vote, and they decided that they would rather have Polos (and Kit Kats, and Nescafe Coffee) within easy reach than maintain a boycott. They just didn't care enough about the issue to go without their treats.
You can tell that this still rankles with me. But I think the main reason it still rankles is because I've become one of those people. I've forgotten why I ever joined the boycott (why I rather haughtily told an ex-boyfriend that I couldn't have a Nestle Easter Egg from his parents, much to their dismay) and have been munching my Kit Kats without another thought.
Thirty years is a long time to hold a grudge. Thirty years is a very, very long time to maintain an interest in a fight. But some people have, and in a world where things go in and out of fashion within 30 days, they have their work cut out for them to keep up the fight.
But they do.
"...on Dr Khaliq Zaman's desk, lots of small pads lie scattered: each contains sheets with information about formula milk, plus pictures of the relevant tin. The idea, he says, is that when a mother comes to him to ask for help with feeding, he will tear a page out of the pad and give it to her. The mother - who may be illiterate - will then take the piece of paper (which seems to all intents and purposes a flyer for the product concerned) to her local shop or pharmacy, and ask for that particular product either by pointing the picture out to the pharmacist or shopkeeper, or by simply searching the shelves for a tin identical to the one in the picture on their piece of paper. "I'd never give these pieces of paper out - when I've got a big enough bundle, I take them home and burn them," says Zaman."
