History

5-7 pages

2 ARTICLES

Milking the Third World? Humanitarianism, Capitalism,
and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott

TEHILA SASSON

BOYCOTTS ARE A MODERN FORM of protest. From their earliest deployment by aboli-
tionists in the late eighteenth century, to the community action against Charles Boy-
cott in Ireland in 1880 from which they derive their name, to their use in the U.S.
civil rights movement, to the international campaign against Nike sweatshops, boy-
cotts have become a key nonviolent means of fighting economic, political, and social
injustices through the marketplace. As a practice that connects consumption to a po-
litical discourse of rights, the collective refusal to purchase a particular product until
certain conditions have been met became increasingly effective in both Europe and
the United States after the Second World War, when consumers gained more power
as political subjects.1 By the 1970s, boycotts were everywhere. It was during this pe-
riod of economic crisis and growing worldwide income disparity that boycotts tran-
scended national boundaries by calling for an international system of justice and hu-
man rights. Whether it was through transnational campaigns such as the anti-
apartheid movement or through local campaigns for the fair trade of tobacco and

I would like to thank Seth Anziska, Jordanna Bailkin, Wendy Brown, Dina Fainberg, Didier Fassin, David
Feldman, Elisabeth Fink, Matthew Hilton, Stefan Ludwig-Hoffmann, Samantha Iyer, Yanay Israeli,
Hilary Falb Kalisman, Yuval Kremnitzer, Thomas Laqueur, Radhika Natarjan, Frank Trentmann, Emily
Rosenberg, Daniel Sargent, Julia Shatz, Deborah Valenze, and James Vernon for their advice on earlier
drafts. This essay has benefited tremendously from the comments and suggestions of Robert Schneider,
Alex Lichtenstein, Jane Lyle, Cris Coffey, and the anonymous readers at the AHR. I am also grateful to
the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Institute for International Studies, and the History Depart-
ment at the University of California, Berkeley for supporting the research on which this article is based.

1 Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain
(Oxford, 2008); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York, 2003); Sheryl Kroen, “A Political History of the Consumer,” The Historical Journal
47, no. 3 (2004): 709–736; Mathew Hilton, “Consumer Politics in Post-war Britain,” in Martin J. Daunton
and Matthew Hilton, eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and
America (Oxford, 2001), 241–259; Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, “Markets in Historical Contexts:
Ideas, Practices and Governance,” in Bevir and Trentmann, eds., Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas
and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2004), 1–24; Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A His-
tory of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009). On earlier boycotts such as the British abolitionist
moment, see, for example, Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Williamsburg, Va., 2006); Clare Midgley, “Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic
Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 137–162. See also the pro-
ceedings of the conference “Boycotts: Past and Present,” especially David Feldman’s opening remarks,
at http://www.pearsinstitute.bbk.ac.uk/events/past-events/2013-events/boycotts-past-and-present/.

VC The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.

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tea, the global market became a site through which citizens developed new identities
as global citizens by shopping at their local supermarkets.2

Exemplifying this trend of the 1970s was the well-known and successful boycott
against the multinational corporation Nestlé. As part of the campaign to end bottle-
feeding in Third World societies, the Nestlé boycott called for the global regulation
of controversial marketing strategies implemented by Western formula companies. It
united a wide array of historical actors, including conservative religious groups, con-
sumer activists, humanitarian organizations, doctors, feminists, and ordinary people,
for the purpose of limiting Nestlé’s corporate power in the Third World. The pro-
testers’ argument was that multinational companies such as Nestlé—which supplied
one-third of the formula used in the world—were exploiting Third World consumers
through an unethical “profit system.”3 The boycott became truly transnational and
received support from government officials and international organizations in both
Western and Third World countries. Both ordinary people and aid experts took part,
thus contributing to the making of a global community.4

Unlike other campaigns, however, the Nestlé boycott was neither a protest
against labor abuses nor a means of creating political pressure against a government.5

Rather, its aim was to protect Third World mothers from multinational corporations
and their baby formula. In this respect, the boycott against Nestlé was unique be-
cause it connected human rights concerns and humanitarian emergencies to issues of
corporate responsibility. Its goal was to limit the power of multinational companies
and to create a more ethical form of market capitalism. And to some extent, it suc-
ceeded in doing just that. The boycott led the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to develop the International
Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes, which set standards of global corpo-
rate responsibility. Although international organizations such as WHO did not have
the means to enforce it, this code of conduct was effective nonetheless in pressuring

2 Gay W. Seidman, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism
(New York, 2007); Haider Ali Khan, The Political Economy of Sanctions against Apartheid (Boulder,
Colo., 1989).

3 Douglas Johnson quoted in Ernest W. Lefever, “Politics and Baby Formula in the Third World,”
Wall Street Journal, January 14, 1981, 26; Bonnie Arnold, “Motive behind Boycott,” Los Angeles Times,
January 18, 1981, R3.

4 Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Con-
temporary World (Berkeley, Calif., 2004).

5 Here I refer in particular to contemporary boycotts such as those led by Cesar Ch�avez and the
United Farm Workers’ lettuce and grape boycotts, as well as the international movement against labor
abuses and apartheid, which target corporations and use the mechanism of the boycott as a means to
other ends. On the anti-apartheid boycotts, see, for example, Simon Stevens, “Boycotts and Sanctions
against South Africa: An International History, 1946–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2016);
Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (Oxford, 2014); Dubow, South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights: The
History of Rights in South Africa (Athens, Ohio, 2012). On Ch�avez see Lori A. Flores, Grounds for
Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Ha-
ven, Conn., 2015); Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the
Farmworkers Movement, ed. Diana Hembree (New York, 1998); Matt Garc�ıa, From the Jaws of Victory:
The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley, Calif., 2012); Frank
Bardacke, Trampling out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Lon-
don, 2012); Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm
Worker Movement (New York, 2009); Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organiza-
tion, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford, 2010). On grape boycotts, see Heidi
Tinsman, Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States (Dur-
ham, N.C., 2014).

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Nestlé, at least for a while, to change its marketing strategies. In 1984, three years af-
ter the code had been adopted, the company agreed to implement it, signing an un-
precedented agreement with its non-governmental critics, and thereby ending a
seven-year international consumer boycott of its products.

Scholars have recently crowned the 1970s as marking a “breakthrough” in human
rights, when an international community began to advocate for global justice beyond
national borders.6 The decade saw a broader epistemological shift toward a new
global ethics, represented in the writings of intellectuals such as Peter Singer and
Onora O’Neill, as well as in the development of new international aid programs.7 The
history of the Nestlé boycott may seem like a marginal tale within this broader story,
but it is illuminating both for what it teaches us about the role of multinational compa-
nies, ethics, and the market in the period, and for what it reveals about the global his-
tory of human rights, development, and humanitarianism.8 The story adds a crucial yet
understudied aspect to our understanding of rights and aid discourses in the 1970s,
when activists strove to reform the global market and create ethical forms of capital-
ism.9 Similar criticisms of advertising practices relating to baby formula appeared on a
much more local scale in Britain and its empire earlier in the century, but it was only
in the 1970s that this “moral economy”—to borrow E. P. Thompson’s term—was
translated and transformed into a political action.10

6 See, for example, Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.,
2010); Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, 2013);
Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American
History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1231–1250; Tom Buchanan, “Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966–7,” Twenti-
eth Century British History 15, no. 3 (2004): 267–289; Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights
Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia, 2009); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968
and Contemporary French Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 2007). For an excellent reflection on the burgeoning lit-
erature on the history of human rights, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” Past
and Present (forthcoming), Advance Access July 22, 2016, doi:10.1093/pastj/gtw013.

7 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1972):
229–243; Onora O’Neill, “Lifeboat Earth,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, no. 3 (1975): 273–292. Sam
Moyn has explored the connection between Singer and O’Neill and the rise of global justice theories in
the 1970s (particularly that of Charles Beitz) in an unpublished manuscript, “The Political Origins of
Global Justice.” I thank him for sharing it with me.

8 Historians have previously debated the nature of the relationship between human rights and hu-
manitarianism. The case of boycotts such as the one against Nestlé clearly shows that in the 1970s (if not
before), human rights and humanitarianism became intimately connected. On this relationship in a dif-
ferent context, see Michael Geyer, “Humanitarianism and Human Rights: A Troubled Rapport,” in Fa-
bian Klose, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (Cambridge, 2016), 31–55.

9 On market democracy, see John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, N.J., 2012).
10 Great Britain, Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, and Almeric William

Fitz Roy, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (London, 1904); E. P.
Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present,
no. 50 (February 1971): 76–136. I draw on Chris Brown’s distinction between moral concerns about a
particular injustice and what he calls “moral capital,” which generates a political action against that injus-
tice. See Brown, Moral Capital, 1–30. I also rely on Thomas Haskell’s insights about the relationship be-
tween capitalism and humanitarianism, although at the same time I show that this relationship was not
inherent to the two but rather was manufactured through humanitarian campaigns such as the one
against Nestlé. See Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” Ameri-
can Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339–361, and “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitar-
ian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 547–566. My analysis expands
on previous discussions about the “moral economy” of humanitarianism and looks not only at the circu-
lation of affects and sentiments, but also at the economics. See Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A
Moral History of the Present, trans. Rachel Gomme (Berkeley, Calif., 2011).

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In revealing how humanitarian activism began to incorporate new actors into the
growing domain of aid, the history of the boycott allows us to do what Matthew Con-
nelly, echoing James Scott, has called “seeing beyond the state.”11 In the “global
shock” of the 1970s, ordinary people, business experts, and even multinational corpo-
rations joined forces with diplomats and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to
become part of the project of feeding the world’s hungry.12 With the end of empires
and an increasingly international and deregulated economy, multinational companies
emerged as new actors in the global community. As capitalism slipped the bounds of
the nation-state, policymakers and activists were questioning the nature of these mul-
tinationals and debating what role they should play in global governance. While in-
ternational attempts to limit the power of such enterprises have failed, the Nestlé
boycott became one solution, if a “weak” one, that emphasized the moral responsibil-
ities of corporations.13

As a somewhat minimal response to the problem of multinational corporate
power, the Nestlé boycott mobilized consumers as global citizens. In acting beyond
their immediate communities to aid distant suffering, they commodified their activ-
ism through their individual consumer choices, using the marketplace not as a way of
generating revenue, but rather as a space for protest. Instead of seeking a restruc-
turing of corporate power and global labor systems, the boycotters focused on the
dangers the market society posed for Third World mothers. Their actions played an
important role in changing how those in the Third World were conceived by aid pro-
grams, transformed from producers to consumers in the global market.14 By politi-
cizing breastfeeding, the boycott forged a new relationship between Third World
mothers and mothers from the West. It generated a debate about marketing and
consumerism in the “underdeveloped” South and debates about the ethical responsi-
bilities that businesses such as Nestlé had toward their consumers. But it also ran the

11 Matthew Connelly, “Seeing beyond the State: The Population Control Movement and the Prob-
lem of Sovereignty,” Past and Present, no. 193 (November 2006): 193–233.

12 Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the
Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Patrick Allan Sharma, “Globalizing Develop-
ment: Robert McNamara at the World Bank” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2010).
On the history of this diverse community, its origins, motivations, methods, and experiences, see Tehila
Sasson, “In the Name of Humanity: Britain and the Rise of Global Humanitarianism” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, 2015).

13 In that respect, this article also contributes to the growing literature on the histories of capitalism
by exploring the type of ethics that emerged in the new deregulated economy of the 1970s. It expands
previous accounts of the boycott, interrogating the ways in which it emerged from the new market econ-
omy of the 1970s and connected to a new human rights discourse rather than exclusively a story of con-
sumer activism. On previous accounts, see Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an
Era of Globalization (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 138–139. On neoliberalism, see, for example, Wendy Brown,
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, 2015); James Ferguson, “The Uses of
Neoliberalism,” Antipode 41, supp. 1 (2010): 166–184; Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal
World Order (Durham, N.C., 2006); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and
the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, N.J., 2012).

14 Although, of course, as some historians have shown, consumerism in the Global South existed in
these places long before the boycott and was not exclusively shaped by Western interests. See, for exam-
ple, Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globaliza-
tion (Berkeley, Calif., 2008); Bronwen Everill, “‘All the baubles that they needed’: ‘Industriousness’ and
the Consumer Revolution in Three Atlantic African Port Cities,” Early American Studies (forthcoming,
Fall 2017); Samantha Iyer, “The Paradox of Poverty and Plenty: Egypt, India, and the Rise of U.S. Food
Aid, 1870s to 1950s” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014).

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risk of joining the very same movement it was fighting against: one that disembedded
the market economy from social and labor relations.15

BOTTLE-FEEDING ARRIVED IN THE Third World in the early 1900s by way of colonial-
ism. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1950s, it was a popular
practice recommended by doctors in both Western and colonial societies, and in-
cluded in development and modernization projects.16 Infant formula was considered
more convenient, nutritionally richer, and even hygienically safer than mother’s
milk.17 Physicians saw bottle-feeding not only as a solution to Western nutritional
problems, but also as a way to prevent diseases such as dysentery in tropical and
semitropical countries. “[I]mproper food has a most weakening effect upon the di-
gestive organs,” the scientist Hermann Lebert argued in a pamphlet he wrote to pro-
mote Nestlé’s Milk Food in 1878. “In such cases I feel sure the [Nestlé] Milk Food
would prove its perfect adaptability, supplying the necessary strength and giving such
tone to the system as to enable it to resist the disease.”18 By the 1920s, bottle-feeding
had become part of colonial policies for combating infant mortality in a number of
areas, including colonial Malaya, the Belgian Congo, Sudan, French West Africa,
Vanuatu and Fiji, and the Philippines.19

Bottle-feeding, in fact, was a response to growing colonial anxiety about demo-
graphic patterns in European and American empires.20 In colonial Malaya, for exam-
ple, infant formula was already being sold in shops in the early 1900s and was widely
publicized in both the English and the vernacular presses. Maternal and child health
clinics, established in the 1920s, taught Malayan women to bottle-feed their babies as

15 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston,
1944). See also Beverly J. Silver and Giovanni Arrighi, “Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belle
�Epoques of British and U.S. Hegemony Compared,” Politics and Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 325–355.

16 As Deborah Valenze argues, it was “shared cultural values [that] made possible the expansion of
popular interest in infant formula.” Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, Conn.,
2011), 176.

17 Ibid.
18 Hermann Lebert, A Treatise on Milk and Henri Nestlé’s Milk Food: For the Earliest Period of

Infancy and in Later Years (Vevey, Switzerland, 1878), 29.
19 Lenore Manderson, “Shaping Reproduction: Maternity in Early Twentieth-Century Malaya,” in

Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly, eds., Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences
in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge, 1998), 26–49; Nancy Rose Hunt, “‘Le bébé en brousse’: European
Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 3 (1988): 401–432; Janice Boddy, “Remembering
Amal: On Birth and the British in Northern Sudan,” in Margaret Lock and Patricia A. Kaufert, eds.,
Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (Cambridge, 1998), 28–57; Jane Turrittin, “Colonial Midwives and
Modernizing Childbirth in French West Africa,” in Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi,
eds., Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 71–94; Margaret Jolly, “Other
Mothers: Maternal ‘Insouciance’ and the Depopulation Debate in Fiji and Vanuatu, 1890–1930,” in Ram
and Jolly, Maternities and Modernities, 177–212; Bonnie McElhinny, “‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good
for Him’: Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines,” Peace
Research Abstracts Journal 42, no. 6 (2005): 183–194.

20 Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–66; McEl-
hinny, “‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him’”; Karl Ittmann, A Problem of Great Importance:
Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918–1973 (Berkeley, Calif., 2013); Michael Worboys,
“The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition between the Wars,” in David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine
and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988), 208–225. On why the concept of imperial history is neces-
sary to our understanding of U.S. global history, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial
Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011):
1348–1391.

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a way to increase infant weight and reduce mortality rates.21 Similarly, in the U.S.-
occupied Philippines, bottle-feeding was introduced as part of a moral and cultural
regime to create modern and self-governing subjects who would fit the U.S. model of
modern citizens.22 It was perceived as part of a development project that would help
modernize colonial subjects as well as keep them healthy.

The popularity of formula was also a product of the inclusion of female workers
in the labor market, not only in industrial Western societies, but also in large-scale
agricultural production in the colonies.23 In Belgian Congo, as Nancy Rose Hunt has
shown, bottle-feeding was introduced as part of a broader effort to strengthen the lo-
cal population during the labor shortage of the early 1920s. This decade saw the rise
of a broader anxiety about depopulation, reflected in numerous colonial reports and
books focused on the topic.24 In 1924 the National Colonial Congress stated that
Congolese mothers who were leaving their villages to join the workforce suffered
from low fertility rates and were at higher risk of an early death. In response, the
Union Minière du Haut Katanga, the Belgian mining company controlled by the colo-
nial state, initiated a new bottle-feeding program, designed especially to increase birth
rates and improve women’s health.25 Bottle-feeding therefore answered an economic
need and became a common practice even before decolonization, when transnational
companies begun to extensively market their products. Both the colonial government
and the formula industry encouraged the use of bottle-feeding over breastfeeding.

It was around this time that the first critique of the practice emerged. An Oxford-
educated physician from Jamaica, Dr. Cicely Williams, was the first to warn about
the disastrous effects of bottle-feeding in the Global South. Known mostly for her
discovery of kwashiorkor—an acute protein deficiency in babies that leads to death
by starvation—Williams was trained in the British Colonial Medical Service as an ex-
pert on child nutrition, first in the Gold Coast and later in Malaya.26 In Malaya, she
investigated the high mortality rates among infants who bottle-fed, leading her to be-
come a specialist on the issue of infant formula and later the first head of the Mater-
nal and Child Health Division of the World Health Organization. Williams found
that early deaths were much more common among artificially fed babies than among
babies who breastfed, especially among the poorest populations. In an address to the
Singapore Rotary Club in 1939, she made the provocative claim that “a baby is mur-
dered by a community” when that community encourages the mother to stop breast-
feeding. Acknowledging the various reasons for the transition to bottle-feeding,
including cultural trends and bad technique, the talk, titled “Milk and Murder,”

21 Manderson, “Shaping Reproduction.”
22 McElhinny, “‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him’”; Vanessa Maher, The Anthropology of

Breast-Feeding: Natural Law or Social Construct (Oxford, 1992).
23 Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding (London, 1988), 189–190.
24 Hunt, “‘Le bébé en brousse,’” 404. Anxieties of depopulation in the French case, for example, ap-

peared both at home and abroad and have reinforced each other. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize:
The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1997); Joshua
Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca,
N.Y., 2000).

25 Hunt, “‘Le bébé en brousse,’” 404–405.
26 Cicely D. Williams, “Kwashiorkor: A Nutritional Disease of Children Associated with a Maize

Diet,” The Lancet 226, no. 5855 (1935): 1151–1152. See also Ann Dally, Cicely: The Story of a Doctor
(London, 1968).

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nonetheless stressed that it was mainly economic conditions that prevented low-
income mothers from properly feeding their babies. It was “misguided propaganda
on infant feeding” that was to blame for the high rates of infant mortality, she con-
cluded.27

But Williams’s critical view of bottle-feeding was not known beyond a small group
of experts until the 1950s, when the problem of protein deficiency in postcolonial
countries became a central concern among nutritional experts. Coinciding with the
rise of the La Leche League, the conservative lobby group that launched the famous
“Breast Is Best” campaign in the United States in 1956, bottle-feeding became asso-
ciated with malnutrition and famine diseases.28 While the study of malnutrition had
first emerged around the Second World War, it was only in the 1950s that aid schemes
focused on development in colonial and postcolonial societies began to target protein
deficiency in preschool children as a major source of hunger.29 By the late 1950s and
the 1960s, child malnutrition had become a central concern of development pro-
grams and schemes for population control in the so-called emerging postcolonial
world.30

In this period of decolonization, development experts, doctors, and health profes-
sionals all saw child malnutrition as an irreversible cause of not only physical, but
also mental and psychological damage. Kwashiorkor and the problem of protein defi-
ciency in early childhood more generally became a central concern to international
and national aid organizations, with numerous international conferences devoted to
it.31 For these nutritional experts, child malnutrition had obvious implications “for
the future manpower and economic development of the countries in which it occurs,
and adds a fearful urgency to the whole problem.”32 The urgency of the situation was
also recognized by policymakers and government officials such as President Lyndon
B. Johnson and Frank Ellis, the director of the Food for Peace program of the U.S.
Agency for International Development, who stated on March 24, 1965, “It has been
firmly established that preschool aged children are most vulnerable to the effects of
malnutrition (in some cases suffering irreversible physical and mental retardation).”33

He therefore urged agencies to make it a priority to attack malnutrition in this
group.

It was within this context that Dr. Derrick B. Jelliffe, who would become the lead-

27 Cicely Williams, “Milk and Murder” (1939), in Naomi Baumslag, ed., Primary Health Care Pioneer:
The Selected Works of Dr. Cicely D. Williams (Geneva, 1986), 66–70.

28 Williams in fact was invited to join the La Leche League’s Medical Advisory Board when it was
founded; Baumslag, Primary Health Care Pioneer, 66. On the history of the La Leche League, see Lynn
Y. Weiner, “Reconstructing Motherhood: The La Leche League in Postwar America,” Journal of Ameri-
can History 80, no. 4 (1994): 1357–1381; Jule DeJager Ward, La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medi-
cine, Feminism, and Religion (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).

29 James Vernon, Hunger: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
30 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge,

Mass., 2010).
31 For example, “Meeting Protein Requirements,” Washington, D.C., 1960; “How to Reach the Pre-

school Child,” Como, Italy, 1963; “Pre-School Child Malnutrition—Primary Deterrent to Human Prog-
ress,” Washington, D.C., 1964; and “Administrative Problems in Programs to Protect Preschool Children,”
Hamburg, 1966. Derrick B. Jelliffe, Child Nutrition in Developing Countries: A Handbook for Fieldworkers
(Washington, D.C., 1969), 2; “The Administrative Aspects of Programmes to Protect the Pre-School Child:
Report of a Conference,” Journal of Tropical Pediatrics 13, no. 2 (1967): 54–58, here 55.

32 “The Administrative Aspects of Programmes to Protect the Pre-School Child.”
33 Jelliffe, Child Nutrition in Developing Countries, 2.

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ing expert in the campaign against infant formula, published his book Child Nutrition
in Developing Countries.34 Trained in the British Colonial Medical Service in Uganda,
Jelliffe took his colonial expertise in nutritional science into the international arena.
In 1956 he became a UNICEF Professor of Pediatrics and Child Health at the Uni-
versity of East Africa at Kampala, before his appointment as director of the new Ca-
ribbean Food and Nutrition Institute at the University of the West Indies in 1966,
the same year he published Child Nutrition. While the book presented general advice
to aid workers helping malnourished children in developing countries, it became an
important text for the campaign against infant formula in the Global South. It argued
against bottle-feeding practices, especially in “tropical regions in terms of nutrition,
economy and sanitation.” It warned against the use of bottle-feeding by “traditional
and semi-sophisticated populations,” in places where sanitation conditions did not
permit the proper consumption of milk substitutes, and discussed the problem of
marketing formula to impoverished societies.35

In 1969 Jelliffe took these arguments to the United Nations when he testified at a
WHO/FAO/UNICEF Protein Advisory Group (PAG) hearing on child nutrition
held in Bogot�a, Colombia. Set up by the World Health Organization in 1955 to make
recommendations on “the suitability, safety, and nutritional value of the various
foods which [UNICEF was] trying to develop for infants and young children,” PAG
had been reorganized in 1961 as a tripartite group advising WHO, UNICEF, and the
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization on nutritional developments, and Jelliffe
became one of its consultants.36 By the early 1970s, the committee had become in-
creasingly interested in marketing practices for infant formula in the Third World
and even established an ad hoc working group on feeding the preschool child, which
specifically focused on promoting breastfeeding and drafted manuals on feeding in-
fants and young children.37 In a report he wrote for the group on the decline in
breastfeeding in the developing world, Jelliffe condemned infant formula companies

34 Ibid. Jelliffe also wrote and advised on how to create an efficient system of childcare (building on
Ford’s model of an assembly line) in the immediate years of decolonization, when most health clinics
lacked highly trained personnel. See Derrick B. Jelliffe, “Organization of MCH Services in Developing
Regions: (VII) Young Child Clinic—Basic Problems,” Journal of Tropical Pediatrics 13, no. 4 (1967):
182–184.

35 Jelliffe, Child Nutrition in Developing Countries, 36. See also Derrick B. Jelliffe, “Approaches to
Village-Level Infant Feeding: (II) Detection of Early Protein-Calorie Malnutrition (PCM),” Journal of
Tropical Pediatrics 13, no. 2 (1967): 67–69; Jelliffe, “Approaches to Village Level Infant Feeding: (3)
Breast-Feeding,” Journal of Tropical Pediatrics 13, no. 3 (1967): 117–123. In both of these texts, repre-
senting a general shift in this period, Jelliffe makes a case for educating the entire family unit rather than
just the mother about child nutrition.

36 “The Formulation of a Protein Advisory Group” (1956), document N3/160/9, file P15/348/2,
World Health Organization Archives, Geneva [hereafter WHOA]; “Reorganization of the Protein Advi-
sory Group,” 1959, document N3/160/9, file P15/348/2, WHOA; Z. I. Kertesz, “The Role and Responsi-
bilities of PAG, 1968,” FAO/WHO/UNICEF PAG, September 1968 Meeting, Rome, document 10/120,
file P15/372/2, WHOA; G. F. Combs, “Development of a Supplementary Food Mixture (CSM) for Child-
ren),” PAG Bulletin 7 (1967): 15–24, here 15, FAO/WHO/UNICEF 613.2 F218, United Nations Ar-
chives, Geneva [hereafter UNA]; Donald R. Sabin, “Implementation of the WHO/FAO/UNICEF
Protein-Rich Foods Program,” in Proceedings of Conference on Soybean Products for Protein in Human
Foods (Washington, D.C., 1962), 13–18, quote from 18.

37 See “Sixteenth Meeting of PAG, Geneva, September 1969,” PAG Bulletin 9 (1970): 1–7, here 3,
FAO/WHO/UNICEF 613.2 F218, UNA; “Strategy Statement on Action to Avert the Protein Crisis in
the Developing Countries,” May 7, 1971, file P15/372/2, WHOA. For an account on the international his-
tory of health care in an era of decolonization in the South Asian context, see Sunil S. Amrith, Decoloniz-
ing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (Basingstoke, 2006).

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for their encouragement of bottle-feeding. He accused them of what he would later
term “commerciogenic malnutrition”—the commercial promotion of artificial infant
feeding—which would become a catchphrase in the campaign against formula com-
panies.38 Responding to his claims, on July 18, 1972, PAG published a series of rec-
ommendations, which called for governments to educate poorer population groups
about breastfeeding and urged pediatricians to discuss the problems of child nutri-
tion with the food industry. The recommendations also specifically asked food com-
panies to develop a clear standard for instructions and information on product labels
for an illiterate population.39 While such efforts would not translate into a mass cam-
paign against the formula industry until a couple of years later, this expertise, rooted
in colonial knowledge and focused on the problem of postcolonial development, be-
came the foundation of the campaign of the 1970s.

IN AUGUST 1973, JUST BEFORE the World Food Conference convened in Rome to dis-
cuss the acute problem of hunger in Third World countries, an article on child mal-
nutrition appeared in the British leftist magazine The New Internationalist. Funded
by the major British charities Oxfam, Christian Aid, and War on Want, the magazine
has long provided commentary on aid in the Third World and development projects.
This particular article offered the opinion of two of the leading child nutrition ex-
perts in Britain, Ralph Hendrikse and David Morley, former colonial servants who
had gained their experience in Africa and South Asia. Titled “The Baby Food Trag-
edy,” it suggested an explanation for the problem of Third World hunger that had
not yet been discussed in the journal: baby formula.

According to Hendrikse and Morley, malnutrition among children in the Third
World was not merely a result of high food prices and weak postcolonial economies;
it was also a product of the practice of bottle-feeding. With the exception of abnor-
mal circumstances such as famine or disaster situations, they argued, bottle-feeding
was one of the main causes of malnutrition and death from starvation. This problem
was twofold: on the one hand, Third World mothers could not afford to give their
babies enough formula to provide adequate nutrition; and on the other, the condi-
tions in which they prepared and stored the formula, particularly the use of unclean
feeding bottles, made it more likely that their babies would contract an infection.
Pointing fingers at Western companies, Hendrikse and Morley claimed that formula
manufacturers were taking advantage of poor mothers by aggressively marketing their
products despite knowing that these women would not be able to create the necessary
conditions to use those products safely. Hendrikse and Morley therefore called for an
international organization that would “agree on an advertising policy [and] will give
full emphasis to the vital importance of breastfeeding in developing countries.”40

The New Internationalist article became a sensation and was circulated to more
than three thousand hospitals in the Global South. It generated responses from nu-
merous business and development experts, but most importantly from Nestlé. The

38 Derrick B. Jelliffe, “Commerciogenic Malnutrition?,” Nutrition Reviews 30, no. 9 (1972): 199–205.
39 S. Prakash Sethi, Multinational Corporations and the Impact of Public Advocacy on Corporate Strat-

egy: Nestle and the Infant Formula Controversy (1994; repr., London, 2012), 50–51.
40 Hugh Geach, “The Baby Food Tragedy,” New Internationalist, no. 6 (August 1973): 8–12.

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FIGURE 1: “A Dangerous Trend,” by Sarah Porter. From “A Dangerous Trend,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, file
00903, box 183, War on Want Collection, SOAS, University of London. Used by permission of the International
Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN).

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company not only published a response in the magazine in October 1973, but also in-
vited activists to its headquarters to learn about its approach to infant formula
sales.41 In December 1973, the activist Mike Muller of War on Want, a British non-
governmental organization dedicated to fighting poverty in the Third World, took
Nestlé up on the invitation and spent several days at the corporation’s headquarters
in Vevey, Switzerland. When Muller returned to London, however, he did not en-
dorse the company. Instead he wrote an inflammatory report, The Baby Killer: A War
on Want Investigation into the Promotion and Sale of Powdered Baby Milks in the Third

World.42

It was this report and the subsequent War on Want campaign that turned the
story into a national—and later international—scandal. Published at the height of
the world food crisis, Muller’s report provided a set of new explanations for why the
Third World was still hungry. The campaign used provocative imagery, as well as in-
terviews with aid workers, to educate ordinary citizens and make them experts on
these issues. It translated complicated medical jargon into simple language, explain-
ing why infant formula was responsible for hunger in the Third World. Instead of
ecological and political explanations for famines such as the major one in the Sahel
region, the report focused on the marketing and sales of milk substitutes by Western
companies such as Nestlé as the main cause of death from starvation. Muller accused
the formula industry of manipulating mothers from low-income families and selling

FIGURE 2: Untitled illustration by Sarah Porter. From “A Dangerous Trend,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, file 00903,
box 183, War on Want Collection, SOAS, University of London. Used by permission of the International Baby
Food Action Network (IBFAN).

41 Sethi, Multinational Corporations and the Impact of Public Advocacy on Corporate Strategy, 52.
42 Mike Muller, The Baby Killer: A War on Want Investigation into the Promotion and Sale of Pow-

dered Baby Milks in the Third World (London, 1974).

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them a product that would kill their babies. The starving babies with swollen abdo-
mens whose images appeared so frequently in the news were not necessarily a prod-
uct of famines and civil wars, he implied, but rather of Western formula diluted or
used in low quantities.

But the so-called Baby Killer campaign offered more than just medical explana-
tions for hunger. It also offered its own interpretation of the failure of development
programs more generally. Through the issue of bottle-feeding, Muller’s report ex-
plained the economic, social, and cultural gaps between the “First” and the “Third
World.” As the promise of the newly decolonized world dissipated, the report helped
shift attention from macro-level politics and modernization theories to altering pat-
terns of consumption as a way of explaining Third World hunger. It offered numer-
ous examples of how Western market interventions had changed food consumption
and local practices in the Third World. A survey of infant feeding practices in Iba-
dan, Nigeria, for example, showed that almost three-quarters of mothers were giving
formula to babies under the age of four months. Other data was collected to examine
consumption of milk substitutes in places such as South Africa, India, and the Philip-
pines. Consulting with business experts, War on Want activists suggested that these
changes in formula consumption had serious implications for “the national economy
of a developing country.”43

The campaign, in fact, participated in a broader discourse in the period about the
failures of the Third World to develop. Indeed, as some scholars have shown, the
Third World as a project itself had “been produced by the discourses and practices
of development,” with deep roots in late-nineteenth-century European colonialism.44

From the early post–World War II period and then with the onset of decolonization,
these development discourses began to emphasize the importance of modernization
and the macroeconomic engineering of “growth” as a means of helping transition tra-
ditional Third World societies to modernity.45 In the early 1970s, as the great prom-

43 Andy Chetley, The Baby Killer Scandal: A War on Want Investigation into the Promotion and Sale of
Powdered Baby Milk Formula (London, 1979), 31. For debates at the Food and Agriculture Organization
between 1973 and 1978 that were echoing similar anxieties, see “Joint FAO/Industry Task Force on Pro-
tein Food Development,” 1973–1978, IP 22/25, Food and Agriculture Organization Archives, Rome.

44 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Prince-
ton, N.J., 1995), 4; Frédérique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin, eds., Dominating Knowledge:
Development, Culture, and Resistance (Oxford, 1990). On the Third World as “a project” also from a
postcolonial perspective, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
(New York, 2008). Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and
the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, Ohio, 2007); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Em-
pire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago, 2011); Timothy Mitchell,
Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), chap. 7.

45 The literature on development is too vast to be cited here, but for examples see James Ferguson,
The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (New
York, 1990); Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Dur-
ham, N.C., 1998); Tania Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Poli-
tics (Durham, N.C., 2007); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty
in Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Michael Mahoney, “Estado Novo, Homem Novo (New State, New
Man): Colonial and Anticolonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930–1977,” in David C.
Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization,
Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, Mass., 2003), 165–198; David C. Engerman, “West
Meets East: The Center for International Studies and Indian Economic Development,” ibid., 199–224;
Victor Koschmann, “Modernization and Democratic Values: The ‘Japanese Model’ in the 1960s,” ibid.,
225–250; Gregg Andrew Brazinsky, “Koreanizing Modernization: Modernization Theory and South Ko-
rean Intellectuals,” ibid., 251–273; Frederick Cooper and Randall M. Packard, eds., International Devel-

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ises of the era of decolonization faded, this development framework began to crum-
ble.

With the pressure of oil crises, the world food crisis, famines in Africa, and grow-
ing debt, the 1970s offered a new framework for understanding the problem of Third
World development. Both national and international agencies had accepted that
most development projects and blueprints with a focus on economic growth had had
a negligible impact on the condition of the global poor. In 1972, Robert McNamara
stated that the World Bank should reorient its policies to attack directly the poverty
of the poorest 40 percent of Third World citizens. This “basic needs” approach was
adopted by many Western governments and subsequently targeted the poorest seg-
ments of the population. Conversely, in 1974 another alternative was adopted by a
coalition of developing countries, the Group of 77, when they proposed at the UN
General Assembly the creation of a “New International Economic Order.” They
presented a program of structural reform and global redistribution, which would
transform what they saw as an unfair and discriminatory global economy. Thus, as
Vanessa Ogle has recently demonstrated, a new language of economic rights joined a
growing international utopian discourse of political rights in the period.46 While the
Group of 77 did not prove successful in these aims, mostly because their program
lacked the support of the United States, their approach reflected a post-imperial cri-
tique and a growing international discontent with aid programs and economic
inequalities.47

The Baby Killer campaign proposed another explanation for the problem of
Third World development, one that focused on economic dependencies and multina-
tional corporations. The campaign echoed some of the broader international anxiety
about the project of development, and at the same time joined a new global dis-
course about consumer rights as a basic need, influenced by Ralph Nader and advo-
cated by Asian activists such as Anwar Fazal of Malaysia.48 What was new in the War
on Want campaign was that it connected these issues to a humanitarian discourse
about world hunger. In other words, the Baby Killer campaign fused development
and humanitarian discourse with consumer activism.49

opment and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
However, as Daniel Immerwahr has shown, the turn to big development programs did not mean neglect-
ing various community development projects on the local level of the village. See Immerwahr, Thinking
Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

46 Vanessa Ogle, “State Rights against Private Capital: The ‘New International Economic Order’
and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981,” Humanity 5, no. 2 (2014): 211–
234.

47 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2013), chap. 12; Giuliano
Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South,
1957–1986, trans. Richard R. Nybakken (Oxford, 2012). The journal Humanity has also recently devoted
one of its issues to the NEIO. See Toward a History of the New International Economic Order, Special
Issue, Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015), in particular Jennifer Bair, “Corporations at the United Nations: Echoes
of the New International Economic Order?,” 159–171.

48 Anwar Fazal, “Consumer Rights: Past, Present and Future,” lecture at the Consumers Interna-
tional 19th World Congress, Hong Kong, May 5, 2011; Fazal, “In Search of Social Justice: The Popula-
tion/Food/Environment Perspective,” address at the 1976 General Conference of the International
Council of Voluntary Agencies, Leysin, Switzerland, December 6–11, 1976.

49 While the historiographies of humanitarianism and development have been rather separated, many
non-governmental and international organizations did not see their work as necessarily disconnected. Rather
than division between humanitarian emergencies and long-term development, there has been an artificial

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For the British non-governmental organization War on Want, the focus on con-
sumer rights became an alternative response to Third World hunger. The charity’s
campaign argued that the growing impoverishment in the Third World was due to
“[l]andlessness, underemployment and the mass migration of refugees to escape po-
litical and economic oppression[, which] leads millions of people into the teeming
slum areas.”50 In this reconfiguration, the Third World was detached from the colo-
nial history that might have led to these conditions. Poverty and hunger, in other
words, resulted because traditional practices were not protected. The solution was
not in the universal project of development. Rather, it lay in protecting these cultural
and traditional differences, epitomized in the one between breast and bottle.

The Baby Killer campaign argued that modernization in places such as Africa, at
the heart of development projects in the 1960s, could not be easily achieved. While
the development projects of the 1960s attempted to modernize postcolonial societies,
poverty, malnutrition, and food shortages still persisted in them. Instead of looking
at national economies, the campaign turned its attention to the role of Western-
based multinationals in Third World hunger or “underdevelopment.” Poor sanita-
tion, a lack of electricity and running water, and the low budgets of poor families
were preventing mothers in developing countries from sterilizing their bottles prop-
erly and purchasing adequate quantities of formula, and yet they were adopting these
modern practices of feeding. “Increasing urbanization and modernization accompa-
nied by socio-economic change,” as one researcher explained, “leads to cultural
changes. The major shift of a rural-based society to an urbanized way of life creates a
cultural vacuum—one that is often filled by adopting Western practices, some of
them harmful.”51 The uneven nature of urbanization in the Third World had resulted
in a gap between a growing population looking for a modern identity and an ever
more impoverished one that could not truly afford it.

Representing a more global trend, the “return to nature” through the issue of
breastfeeding acquired specific connotations in the context of the Third World. As the
anthropologist Donna Haraway argued, gender became a key way in which Western
societies coded images of the Third World.52 While in the West the practice of bottle-
feeding was the result of a natural progression of gender and market relations, the
Baby Killer campaign argued that the Third World had not yet matured enough to
adopt it. Within the Baby Killer narrative, Third World culture did not permit the nat-
ural connections to be severed between the breast and the hungry baby. According to
Jelliffe, who became one of the main consultants for the campaign, breastfeeding al-
lows “a less traumatic entry into the world,” providing more support and security,
which in all probability leads to a more contented, responsive child.53 Moreover, it con-
tributes to the development of the idea of women as mothers as well as sexual beings.

project promoted by many non-governmental organizations to claim charity status while undergoing pub-
lic scrutiny. See, for example, discussions about what constitutes charitable work in “Developments
Regarding Charity Commission,” June 11, 1964, COM/3/1/23, Oxfam Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

50 Chetley, The Baby Killer Scandal, 40.
51 Ibid., 35.
52 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New

York, 1989), 135–136.
53 Ibid.; see also David Morley and Margaret Woodland, See How They Grow: Monitoring Child

Growth for Appropriate Health Care in Developing Countries (Oxford, 1979).

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For Third World mothers, breastfeeding was a way not only to generate “love and af-
fection” toward the infant, but also to create “a greater interest in an early return to
sexual intercourse with their partners.” Thus, according to the campaign, it encourages
“a closer bond between all three units of the family.”54 The battle between the breast
and bottle was now at the heart of the making of the postcolonial family.55

As the War on Want campaign saw it, the problem was more than just economic in-
equality; there was also a cultural disparity between the Global North and South. The
formula industry not only introduced modern technologies of baby feeding to the Third
World, it also brought in advertising techniques that created a market, and with it new
consumer desires. The formula industry imparted Western ideas of consumerism to an
uneducated population unable to decipher them. As one nutritional expert put it, “milk
companies [were] creating a magic belief in the white man’s white milk powder.”56 The
idea of an unbridgeable cultural gap between the Global North and South consequently
replaced colonialism as the principal structure for explaining the causes of Third World
hunger.57 The “Third World” needed to be protected rather than transformed.

The Baby Killer report and the subsequent campaign received wide coverage in
the British press as well as in Europe. The report was translated into German, French,
Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Malay, Tamil, and several other languages. One version in par-
ticular further advanced its publicity. In June 1974, a Swiss organization called the
Arbeitsgruppe Dritte Welt (Third World Working Group) translated the report into
German and altered its title to Nestlé tötet Babies (Nestlé Kills Babies). In response,
Nestlé sued the group in Bern for libel. While Nestlé won the libel case in July 1976,
the suit cost the company its public image; composed of seventeen unknown activists,
Arbeitsgruppe Dritte Welt waged a public fight against the giant Nestlé over the
course of the two-year trial.58 The company was also the focus of a 1976 documentary,
Bottle Babies, by a West German filmmaker, Peter Krieg. Targeting Nestlé explicitly,
the twenty-minute film investigated the company’s practices of marketing infant for-
mula in Nairobi, Kenya, and used harrowing footage of a cemetery full of babies’
graves.59

The Bern trial highlighted the issue of bottle-feeding in the Global South and

54 Chetley, The Baby Killer Scandal, 34. Chetley is paraphrasing Derrick and Patrice Jelliffe’s ideas
about the relationship between breastfeeding and women’s sexuality. Jelliffe and Jelliffe, Human Milk in
the Modern World: Psychosocial, Nutritional, and Economic Significance (Oxford, 1978), 153–159.

55 On the postcolonial family, see Jordanna Bailkin, “The Postcolonial Family? West African Chil-
dren, Private Fostering, and the British State,” Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (2009): 87–121; Bail-
kin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, Calif., 2012).

56 Dr. J. Kreysler, WHO nutrition specialist, quoted in Irish Infant Formula Action Group, Bottle
Feeding: A Symbol of Progress? (Geneva, 1981), file 00903, box 183, War on Want Collection, SOAS, Uni-
versity of London [hereafter WOW].

57 On imperial amnesia, see Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London,
2004). Unlike Gilroy, however, I am suggesting here that imperial amnesia may not have been a planned
ideology but rather an unintended consequence of a new type of activism in a newly deregulated market
economy. The market, to follow Marx, had no history.

58 Felix Spies, “Der Pyrrhussieg von Bern,” Die Zeit, no. 28 (July 2, 1976), http://www.zeit.de/1976/
28/der-pyrrhussieg-von-bern; Lisa H. Newton, “A New Power Agenda: Tracking the Emergence of a
New Global Polity in the Infant Formula Controversy,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 19, no. 2
(2000): 5–39, here 9.

59 Bottle Babies (dir. Peter Krieg, Teldok Films, 1975; distributed by Unifilm, New York City). A
copy can be found in box 3, Action for Corporate Accountability Records, INFACT Records [hereafter
INFACT], Minnesota Historical Society Archives [hereafter MHSA].

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http://www.zeit.de/1976/28/der-pyrrhussieg-von-bern

FIGURE 3: “International Code,” by Sarah Porter. From “The International Code,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, file
00903, box 183, War on Want Collection, SOAS, University of London. Used by permission of the International
Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN).

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2016

helped place Nestlé at the heart of the problem of nutrition in the Third World. It
tapped into a growing network of consumer activism, which had been developing in
the Global South since the late 1960s, as exemplified by the Consumers Association
of Penang (CAP).60 Founded by Anwar Fazal, CAP led one of the strongest con-
sumer movements outside of Europe and North America and was partially financed
by the British organization Christian Aid. The association’s objective was to “ensur[e]
the right of every consumer to basic needs . . . especially the poor whose needs often
go unnoticed.” More broadly, it grappled with modernization and tradition in Malay-
sia by challenging the state’s narratives of economic progress. Influenced by the Brit-
ish—and later the Bern—campaign, CAP began to turn its attention to the activities
of multinational corporations such as Nestlé. Fazal, in fact, joined forces with the
Western Nestlé boycotters in the late 1970s and coordinated some of their activities
as part of an organization called the International Baby Food Action Network.61

Malaysia was not alone in this regard. In 1974, the secretary of health in Papua
New Guinea issued a warning against the use of infant formula and notified shop-
keepers that “The Health Department will not tolerate any advertisement for feeding
bottles.” Three years later, the government introduced new legislation that banned

FIGURE 4: American boycotters. From “The International Code,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, file 00903, box 183, War
on Want Collection, SOAS, University of London. Used by permission of the International Baby Food Action
Network (IBFAN).

60 Consumers Organization of Penang, “Vision & Mission,” http://www.consumer.org.my/index.php/
homepage/about-us/69-vision-a-mission. According to Hilton, the earliest consumer movement to emerge
outside of Europe and North America was the Kenya Consumers’ Organization, created in 1951 by a
group of housewives in Nairobi. “Yet consumerism as a basic needs movement developed more readily
in Asia” in the mid-1950s, “perhaps building on the traditions and tactics of the swadeshi movement.” By
1963 a similar consumer organization was launched in the Philippines, followed by the Consumer Associ-
ation of Singapore (CASE) and the Philippine Consumer Movement in 1971, and the Indonesian Con-
sumer Organization in 1973. Hilton, Prosperity for All, 82, 83.

61 Leah Margulies to Anwar Fazal and Choong Tet Sieu, January 13, 1983, box 33, Action for Corpo-
rate Accountability Records, Affiliate Groups, 1973–1994, MHSA.

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http://www.consumer.org.my/index.php/homepage/about-us/69-vision-a-mission

all advertising of formulas and made them available by prescription only. Similarly,
the Nigerian government placed restrictions on the marketing of baby formula. In
Niger and Barbados, promotional materials were not allowed in women’s health clin-
ics. In Jamaica, the government banned sales personnel and “milk nurses” (sales-
women who dressed as nurses and distributed formula samples to new mothers)
from visiting hospitals. Guyana and Kenya also restricted marketers’ access to hospi-
tals and controlled the price of infant formula. Trinidad, too, imposed price controls
on formula products. In Algeria the government started marketing formula under a
single state name, while in Zambia the government nationalized the industry.62 In
1976 the Baby Killer campaign was also taken up by some American church groups,
who eventually led the Nestlé boycott.

BY THE TIME THE CAMPAIGN had reached the United States, consumer politics was
already an integral part of American political identity and culture. From the early
years of the Cold War, many Americans saw their nation as the model for the world
of a society committed to mass consumption and what were assumed to be its far-
reaching benefits.63 In this “Consumers’ Republic,” as the historian Lizabeth Cohen
has called it, citizen and consumer were often interchangeable identities, shaping
American values, attitudes, and behaviors. Consumers were recognized as a political
subject by policymakers, including John F. Kennedy, who declared in 1960 that the
federal government intended to represent the consumer, “the only man in our econ-
omy without a high-powered lobbyist.”64 By the 1970s, political activists such as
Ralph Nader had turned their attention to the role of private businesses and their re-
sponsibility for the safety of their customers, targeting corporations like General
Motors.65

Throughout the decade, the U.S. government confronted the need to regulate mul-
tinationals in a new way. Federal laws were enacted to regulate the quality of food,
medicine, cosmetics, and vehicles; to ban the use of deceptive advertising and labeling;
and to protect citizens from threats to their welfare and security.66 In the United
States, therefore, the battle of bottle versus breast became part of the well-developed
consumer politics concerned with the legal and ethical obligations that private compa-
nies owed to their customers. As a result, in the U.S., the movement was pushed even
more forcefully to focus on corporate responsibility, adopting a new language of anti-
corporatism and new strategies of shareholder activism as well as boycotts.

As corporate governance grew in this decade, shareholder activism became a
popular strategy in the United States to restrict the growing power of multinational

62 Muller, The Baby Killer, 12; Chetley, The Baby Killer Scandal, 108; Sethi, Multinational Corpora-
tions and the Impact of Public Advocacy on Corporate Strategy, 139. See also Zimbabwe Ministry of
Health, Baby Feeding: Behind and Towards a Health Model for Zimbabwe (Harare, 1981), file 00903, box
183, WOW.

63 Some historians, including Lawrence B. Glickman, go even further and argue that consumer poli-
tics was integral to American political culture from the founding. See Glickman, Buying Power.

64 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 345.
65 Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (New

York, 1965).
66 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 346; John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regula-

tion (Cambridge, 2000).

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companies.67 In the mid-1970s, American church organizations turned to the New
York City–based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), an interna-
tional coalition of religious investors from the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jew-
ish faiths. It was the efforts of the ICCR, together with other religious organizations
concerned with the connection between global justice and corporate responsibility,
that would eventually lead to the Nestlé boycott. Formed in 1971, the ICCR was one
of the major actors in the development of shareholder activism in the United States.
Even before taking on the issue of formula marketing in the Third World, it became
the coordinator for shareholder resolutions like the one led against General Motors
in 1971, which influenced the Sullivan principles and the campaign against apart-
heid.68 The organization also became involved with other shareholder resolutions
concerning environmental justice and nuclear arms control.

In 1976, the ICCR turned its focus to the issue of bottle-feeding when it was
asked to help with a shareholder resolution to be presented to the board of directors
of an American manufacturer of infant formula, Bristol-Myers. Introduced by a
Roman Catholic organization, the Sisters of the Precious Blood, who owned five
hundred shares of the pharmaceutical company’s stock, the resolution requested the
board of directors to provide the corporation’s shareholders with a report on its poli-
cies regarding the sale of infant formula in the Third World. In a proxy statement,
Bristol-Myers responded that it did not promote its products to populations who
could not use it properly. The Sisters felt that the statement was “materially false
and misleading,” and filed a lawsuit against the company.69 Together with the ICCR,
the Sisters collected dozens of testimonials to show that Bristol-Myers was knowingly
marketing and selling its formula products to mothers who were too poor to use it
safely. While the case was dismissed because the Sisters had failed to show that the
company’s proxy statement affected their financial interests, it nevertheless helped
the ICCR develop a body of expertise on and interest in the problem of formula
marketing in the Third World.70 Influenced by the suit as well as by the 1975 UN
Conference on Women, the ICCR commissioned research on the problem of bottle-
feeding in Third World countries and helped other organizations with similar law-
suits against Borden, Ross-Abbott, American Home Products, and Wyeth Laborato-
ries. When these lawsuits proved unsuccessful, the ICCR turned to creating a larger

67 Robert A. G. Monks, “Governing the Multinational Enterprise: The Emergence of the Global
Shareowner,” in Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Leviathans: Multinational Corporations
and the New Global History (Cambridge, 2005), 189–201. See also N. Craig Smith, Morality and the Mar-
ket: Consumer Pressure for Corporate Accountability (London, 1990); David Vogel, The Market for Virtue:
The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility (Washington, D.C., 2007); Jeff Gramm, Dear
Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism (New York, 2016).

68 Drafted by the Reverend Leon H. Sullivan, the principles set standards for preventing racial dis-
crimination by U.S. companies working in South Africa. Sullivan used his power as a member of the
board of directors of General Motors, which at the time was the largest employer of blacks in South Af-
rica, to pressure the South African government. Lisbeth Segerlund, Making Corporate Social Responsibili-
ty a Global Concern: Norm Construction in a Globalizing World (Farnham, 2013), 54; S. Prakash Sethi,
Setting Global Standards: Guidelines for Creating Codes of Conduct in Multinational Corporations (Hobo-
ken, N.J., 2003), 95–110; Simon Stevens, “Why South Africa? The Politics of Anti-Apartheid Activism in
Britain in the Long 1970s,” in Eckel and Moyn, The Breakthrough, 204–225.

69 Sisters of the Precious Blood, Inc., v. Bristol-Myers Co., 431 F. Supp. 385, 386–387 (S.D.N.Y. 1977).
70 Ibid.; Leah Margulies, “The Sisters of the Precious Blood vs. Bristol-Myers: A Report on the Sta-

tus of the Suit,” June 20, 1976, box 23, Action for Corporate Accountability Records, Company Files,
1973–1994, MHSA.

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organization, which would lead a campaign in the United States against the dubious
practices of formula marketing.

In November 1976, the organizational leader of the ICCR, the feminist and left-
wing activist Leah Margulies, met with Doug Johnson, the head of the Third World
Institute in Minneapolis, and recruited him to help create such a campaign.71 For
Margulies, the baby-bottle issue was a way to connect Third World hunger to femi-
nism. Johnson had been an active participant in the anti–Vietnam War movement
before he became the director of the Third World Institute, a research organization
devoted to issues of global hunger and social justice in places such as Guatemala and
Honduras, in 1973. Margulies and Johnson represented one model of the ways in
which the ’68 generation became involved in national and international politics
through human rights, development, and humanitarian issues.72 Together they di-
rected the American campaign against formula companies and eventually the Nestlé
boycott.

In January 1977, Margulies and Johnson established the Infant Formula Action
Coalition (INFACT), with Johnson as its president. INFACT aimed to raise public
awareness of the problem of milk substitutes and based itself in the Third World
Institute, which was located in the Newman Center on the campus of the University
of Minnesota. Having originally been created as a local grassroots organization,
INFACT was reluctant at first to use boycotts as a tactic. Instead, Johnson focused
on an educational campaign on college campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Using
some of the materials produced by the British and German campaigns, including the
Baby Killer report and the German documentary Bottle Babies, INFACT led seminars
and published leaflets on the connection between hunger and baby formula. Much like
the British campaign across the Atlantic, INFACT attempted to educate ordinary citi-
zens about the marketing practices of Western formula companies in Third World so-
cieties. Years later, Johnson recalled that he could not have foreseen the magnitude of
the organization’s success.73

It was only after INFACT started to receive major support from co-ops and the
consumer movement that the idea of the boycott was born. As part of a larger trend
in the United States, particularly popular in the Twin Cities and the Bay Area, the
co-op movement became central in the protest against formula companies. Its ideals
of shared community and personal politics blended well with INFACT’s criticism of
economic dependencies.74 The organization decided to focus its boycott on Nestlé
not only because it was one of the largest infant formula companies in the world, but
also because it was not an American corporation.75 While INFACT and other con-

71 According to Johnson, he and Margulies had originally met a year earlier, at a development con-
ference in Palacios, Texas, but it was at the meeting in November 1976 that they officially begun to col-
laborate. Douglas Johnson, oral interview, conducted June 10, 2013.

72 Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–
1977 (New York, 2008).

73 Douglas Johnson interview.
74 Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994).
75 “Baby Bottle Disease: There’s Big Money in It,” boycott flyer, box 5, INFACT, MHSA; “Boycott

Nestle�,” n.d., Events and Announcements, 1977–1980, ibid.; “Infant Formula: An Activist Campaign,”
reprinted from Business International, Europe’s Consumer Movement: Key Issues and Corporate Responses
(Geneva, 1980), box 4, INFACT, MHSA; Barbara Garson, “The Bottle Baby Scandal: Milking the Third
World for All It’s Worth,” Mother Jones 2, no. 10 (December 1977): 33–44.

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sumer activists could have directly influenced American-based companies through
shareholder resolutions and political pressure, the Swiss-based multinational Nestlé
was outside INFACT’s direct reach. In the absence of any direct political and eco-
nomic power to regulate a Swiss-based multinational, the choice of a consumer boy-
cott was seen as the only viable way to create international pressure against Nestlé.76

On July 4, 1977, INFACT launched the boycott at a public rally in front of Nes-
tlé’s U.S. offices in Minneapolis.77 INFACT’s campaign argued that Nestlé was
knowingly taking advantage of Third World mothers and their lack of knowledge as
consumers about the products being sold to them. They met with Nestlé representa-
tives and insisted that the company immediately stop all promotion of infant formu-
las in the Third World.78 According to INFACT’s research, the company was using
deceptive imagery, depicting healthy babies near modern kitchens, in spite of the fact
that Third World mothers did not have such facilities available. INFACT showed
that Nestlé was also capitalizing on specific markets’ preferences in order to sell its
product. In Malaysia, for example, the company started selling “Lactogen with Hon-
ey,” tapping into Malaysian beliefs about the healing nature of honey, although Nes-
tlé knew that honey added no nutritional value.79 In Tanzania, mothers frequently
mixed the wrong amounts (thus giving their babies less nutritionally than what was
recommended by the formula companies) because the instructions were printed in
English rather than the local language.80 Echoing the Baby Killer campaign,
INFACT accused Nestlé of manipulating Third World mothers from low-income
families, using salesgirls, false advertising, and gimmicks such as free gifts to sell
them a product that would kill their babies. These mothers, according to the boycott-
ers, did not have the means to be full participants in consumer society and under-
stand the tricks played on them by Western Mad Men. Through the boycott, activists
thus changed the ways in which aid programs conceived Third World citizens—they
were now seen as part of the system of global consumer capitalism rather than
merely a source of cheap labor and industrial goods.81

In November 1977, INFACT held a national conference, attended by representa-
tives from the medical profession, churches, and aid organizations. The participants
decided to take the boycott national, expanding its scope from Minneapolis to the
entire U.S.82 The boycott received support from ordinary women across the United
States. It coincided with the rising popularity of breastfeeding in the U.S., influenced
by second-wave feminism and new approaches to female sexuality, such as those ex-
pressed by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the feminist group behind

76 Douglas Johnson to TWI “Friends,” May 5, 1977, box 5, INFACT, MHSA.
77 Gloria Onland, “Nestlé’s Infant Formula Marketing in Third World Protested,” Minnesota Daily,

July 5, 1977.
78 Douglas A. Johnson, “Confronting Corporate Power: Strategies and Phases of the Nestle Boy-

cott,” Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy 8 (1986): 323–344.
79 Chetley, The Baby Killer Scandal, 72.
80 Ibid., 48.
81 It is important to remember, though, that the majority of world laborers were still based in the

Global South. Historians of capitalism have privileged the role of the consumer in political and social dis-
courses in the postwar period and beyond. The story of the Nestlé boycott, however, shows us that we
need to pay special attention to when and how identities such as the consumer (or for that matter the en-
trepreneur, the trader, and the banker) received priority in these discourses over those of the laborer
and the producer.

82 Garson, “The Bottle Baby Scandal.”

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Our Bodies, Ourselves, during the 1970s.83 While the movement for breastfeeding
may have originated in a defense of traditional gender roles by the La Leche League
in 1956, by 1977 the majority of its support was coming from the most progressive
voices of feminist criticism. Breastfeeding as a health issue gained visibility with the
emergence of the women’s movement in the 1970s.84 The motto “Breast Is Best,”
which started as a conservative comment on the family, became a slogan of women’s
liberation from the monopoly of multinational companies on female sexuality and
the medicalization of women’s bodies at childbirth. By the end of 1977, INFACT was
receiving some forty to fifty letters a week from citizens who supported the boycott,
many of them women.85 The boycott spread internationally to more than eighty orga-
nizations, from the United States, Britain, Canada, Sweden, Norway, and the Federal
Republic of Germany. While it may have started as a protest by a grassroots network
of church-affiliated hunger organizations, by the early 1980s the boycott had become
an international movement against formula companies.

The Nestlé boycott was an attempt to use the global and deregulated market to
connect Western consumers to Third World mothers. Using consumer activism against
the “extraterritorial” multinational corporation, it strove to mobilize a global civil soci-
ety morally committed to the plight of humanitarian suffering. It was a type of local
activism that connected everyday purchases to global inequalities and international
development discourse. The turn to market-based activism in the form of a boycott al-
lowed the inclusion of ordinary people—and not just aid experts—as citizens of the
world. In this model, both activists and ordinary consumers saw themselves as having a
shared responsibility and commitment to a single global community rather than indi-
vidual nations.86

But this new model also had problems from its inception. In using the global mar-
ket as the basis for its protest, the boycott reproduced the problems of globalization,
most notably its paternalism and abstractions.87 According to the campaign, Third
World societies needed to mature into a modern social body, capable of being con-
sumers—independent actors in the market capable of making free and rational
choices. Paradoxically, the solution to the perils of market capitalism in the Third
World was thus seen to lie in Western consumer choice. The boycotters called for re-
strictions on the global market in order to protect Third World societies from the
dangers of modernity. In the absence of direct political authority over the turmoil of
market capitalism, the global market emerged as one of the main arenas in which the
struggle against world hunger needed to be fought and resolved.

83 Kathy Davis, The Making of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Dur-
ham, N.C., 2007), 27; See also Linda Gordon, “Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves,” The Nation, May 29,
2008, https://www.thenation.com/article/translating-our-bodies-ourselves/. I thank Emily Rosenberg for
suggesting this connection.

84 Vanessa Maher, “Breast-Feeding in Cross Cultural Perspective,” in Maher, The Anthropology of
Breast-Feeding, 1–35.

85 Douglas Johnson interview.
86 For a more conceptual discussion of global citizenship and globalization, see Saskia Sassen, A

Sociology of Globalization (New York, 2007); Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Sub-
jects and Spaces for Politics,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46 (2002): 4–25; Sassen, Losing Control? Sov-
ereignty in the Age of Globalization (New York, 1996).

87 Sassen, Losing Control.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/translating-our-bodies-ourselves/

ONE OF THE MAIN SUCCESSES of the American boycott was in lobbying Congress to in-
quire into the marketing strategies of the formula industry. In hopes of securing pub-
lic investigatory hearings, the boycotters wrote hundreds of letters to Democratic
senators Ted Kennedy and Frank Church, who had been involved in the issue of reg-
ulating multinationals through their respective work in the Senate’s subcommittees
on Health and Scientific Research and on Multinational Corporations.88 Kennedy
eventually agreed to chair a Senate hearing, which was set for May 23, 1978. The
hearings included representatives from four major formula companies: Nestlé, Bris-
tol-Myers, American Home Products (Wyeth), and Abbott/Ross, of which all but
Nestlé were American companies. In his opening remarks, Kennedy defined the con-
tours of the debate when he asked, “Whose responsibility is it to see that the[se]
products are properly used—the manufacturer, the health professionals, or the gov-
ernment involved? Whose responsibility is it to control the advertising, marketing
and promotional activities which, in and of themselves, may create a market in spite
of public health considerations?”89 For Oswald Ballarin, the chairman of Nestlé Bra-
zil and the company’s representative at the hearing, however, these questions were
“an indirect attack on the free world’s economic system.”90

Kennedy’s questions resonated with some of the tensions within national and in-
ternational aid discourses of the 1970s about antipoverty and humanitarian politics.91

By asking them, he exposed a crisis in governance over who should administer aid
and be held accountable for poverty and hunger in the Third World. After the end
of empires, international organizations, non-governmental agencies, and private enti-
ties became the centers of development thinking and practices.92 But formal institu-
tions such as the World Bank and the United Nations were not the only objects of
this transition. Activists, policymakers, and academics saw multinational corporations
as other actors that might participate in global governance. The Nestlé boycott crystal-
lized this new approach by calling multinational corporations to account for the world’s
hunger. Regulation of health care and food politics became a responsibility not just of
states, but of non-governmental and private agencies as well. The marketplace became
the domain in which these various actors met to regulate human rights violations
through an ethical form of capitalism.

The Senate hearing framed the formula issue in terms of duties and rights and
not just a humanitarian crisis. Not only medical specialists such as Derrick Jelliffe
but also business experts like James Post, a professor of management at Boston Uni-
versity, were invited to speak about global corporate responsibility. Post argued that
from a business point of view, formula companies were deliberately taking advantage

88 Dan McCurry to Leah Margulies, “Infant Formula Congressional Hearings Campaign,” February
20, 1978, box 3, INFACT, MHSA; Brent Fisse and John Braithwaite, The Impact of Publicity on Corpo-
rate Offenders (Albany, N.Y., 1983).

89 Opening Statement by Senator Ted Kennedy, in United States Congress, Senate, Marketing and
Promotion of Infant Formula in the Developing Nations, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health and
Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.,
1978), 2.

90 Statement of Oswald Ballarin, ibid. 127.
91 On how the United States dealt with these issues in its foreign politics, see, for example, Daniel J.

Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New
York, 2015).

92 Patrick A. Sharma, “The United States, the World Bank, and the Transformation of Development
in the 1970s,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 3 (2013): 572–604.

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of social changes that promoted bottle-feeding. According to Post, consumers in
Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia accounted for almost half of
the global formula market. “Using conservative projections of population growth,”
he said, “I have estimated that before 1980, the developing world will be spending
more than $1 billion per year for infant formula”—an amount that was “more than
the World Bank loaned to all the nations of the Caribbean and Latin America in
1974 or to all African nations south of the Sahara in 1977.”93 “The competitive mar-
keting of infant formula,” he added, “produces no inherent benefits for the popula-
tion of a developing nation . . . In the past, the industry has argued that freedom of
consumer choice was reason enough to allow its products to be sold, and that they
were not responsible for the lack of pure water, the poverty, or the illiteracy of the
population. But that argument cannot legitimize a product whose misuse is predict-
able and calculable.” Post’s testimony juxtaposed Western consumer culture with the
conditions in the Global South and showed that societies in the Global South were
not fully ready for the “freedom of consumer choice.”94

The Senate hearings helped vocalize the calls for an international body to regu-
late the sale of milk formula, and for the creation, three years later, of the Interna-
tional Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. In so doing, it joined a growing
national and international debate over the course of the decade about corporate
power and the governance of multinational enterprises. The term “multinational cor-
poration” itself was first used in 1960 by David Lilienthal, who had achieved promi-
nence as a development expert after he became the director of the Tennessee Valley
Authority.95 By the early 1970s, multinationals had become central actors within a
global economy. Policymakers, scholars, and commentators recognized multination-
als as a global force that was challenging the boundaries of the nation-state and
avoiding the jurisdiction of national and international state direction.96

One of the most well-known critiques of multinationals came from Raymond
Vernon of Harvard, who in 1971 claimed that “the sovereign states are feeling na-
ked.”97 The development of mass communication and technology, he argued, had in-
tegrated the world economy through transnational trade, migration, and capital flow.
In the process, however, the political and legal hold of the nation-states was weak-
ened by its dependence on market forces and private entities.98 In a more populist

93 Testimony of James E. Post, in U.S. Senate, Marketing and Promotion of Infant Formula in the
Developing Nations, 117.

94 Ibid., 118. The limits of “free choice” for Third World mothers were also endorsed by activists in
the United Kingdom and the United States. See “A Dangerous Trend,” booklet, 1982, file 00903, box
183, WOW.

95 David Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall
of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic
History 26, no. 3 (2002): 335–374.

96 Although historians have shown that the history of multinational enterprise can be dated as far
back as the eighteenth century, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the term “multinational” itself ap-
peared as these industries transitioned from imperial to post-imperial economies. Stephen J. Kobrin,
“Multinational Corporations, the Protest Movement, and the Future of Global Governance,” in Chan-
dler and Mazlish, Leviathans, 219–236. See also Yao-su Hu, “Global or Stateless Corporations Are
National Firms with International Operations,” California Management Review 34, no. 2 (1992): 107–126;
Prashad, The Darker Nations, 403–407.

97 See, for example, Raymond Vernon, “Economic Sovereignty at Bay,” Foreign Affairs 47 (October
1968): 110–122; Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises (New York, 1971).

98 S. C. Sen, Multinational Corporations in the Developing Countries (Calcutta, 1978).

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and overt account, in 1974 the political scientist Richard J. Barnet and the economist
Ronald E. Müller similarly criticized multinational power for eroding national sover-
eignty in both Western and Third World countries. Serialized in the magazine The
New Yorker, their book Global Reach exposed illegal political contributions at home
and bribery abroad by major U.S. multinationals, thereby adding to popular suspi-
cion of multinational power. Multinationals, according to Barnet and Müller, were
independent of postcolonial governments and therefore created political instability
by dodging tax and security laws.99

The criticism of multinational corporations joined a series of attempts to investi-
gate and limit their power in both the national and international spheres. In the
United States, for example, the Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corpora-
tions, chaired by Frank Church, investigated the impact of globalized American busi-
ness on the nation’s foreign relations.100 The committee’s work, however, eventually
led to only one piece of formal legislation, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of
1977, a rather minimal regulation that was limited to the issue of bribery.101 On a
more international level, the United Nations tried to create mechanisms to regulate
global enterprises through a Corporate Code of Conduct. Influenced by the discus-
sions of a New International Economic Order in the early 1970s, the UN created a
Commission on Transnational Corporations that would study the role of multina-
tional corporations and their impact on developing countries.102 The commission’s
highest priority was the creation of a Code of Conduct on Transnational Corpora-
tions, which would include environmental protection, the safeguarding of human
rights, and the adoption of high standards of corporate governance. The debates
over the nature of the code, however, reached an impasse in 1974, when the United
States insisted that it would bind both multinational organizations and governments
to work toward national development. Such a suggestion ran directly counter to the
fundamental principle of the New International Economic Order because it implied
interference in the absolute sovereignty of states.103 The code was eventually aban-

99 Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corpora-
tions (New York, 1974). See also Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Politi-
cal Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York, 1975); Gilpin, “Three Models of the Future,”
International Organization 29, no. 1 (1975): 37–60.

100 The subcommittee focused on various fields, including the role of multinational oil companies in
the oil crisis of 1973–1974, trade and investment with the Eastern Bloc, the relationship between multina-
tional food companies and local American producers, and questionable payments of potential bribery by
American companies to foreign officials in the Global South. See, for example, Multinational Corpora-
tions and United States Foreign Policy: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations of
the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Third–[Ninety-Fourth] Congress (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1973–1976); Multinational Corporations in the Dollar Devaluation Crisis: Report on a Ques-
tionnaire—A Staff Report (Washington, D.C., 1975); Multinational Oil Corporations and U.S. Foreign
Policy: Report Together with Individual Views to the Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C.,
1975); U.S.S.R. and Grain: A Staff Report (Washington, D.C., 1976).

101 See also Vernie Oliveiro, “The United States, Multinational Corporations, and the Politics of
Globalization,” in Ferguson, Maier, Manela, and Sargent, The Shock of the Global, 143–155.

102 Bair, “Corporations at the United Nations”; Jennifer Bair, “From the Politics of Development to
the Challenges of Globalization,” Globalizations 4, no. 4 (2007): 486–499; Nasrollah S. Fatemi, Gail W.
Williams, and Thibaut De Saint-Phalle, Multinational Corporations: The Problems and the Prospects
(South Brunswick, 1975).

103 While the developing countries ended up accepting some of the principles of this suggestion, they
still resisted the idea that an international code would supersede domestic laws. See Bair, “Corporations
at the United Nations.”

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doned, but it nonetheless reflected a new international concern about the increasing
international role of multinational corporations and their impact on the Third
World.104

Acknowledging the growing power of multinationals, albeit suspicious of their in-
fluence, government officials, international organizations, and activists attempted to
find ways in which corporations could be integrated into more ethical forms of mar-
ket exchange through international laws and institutions. Rather than limiting their
power in postcolonial economies, activists called for the creation of mechanisms to
hold multinational corporations to certain ethical and human rights values.105 Their
actions represented the emergence of a new ethical approach to capitalism, or as
Willis W. Harman, the director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy at the
Stanford Research Institute, called it, a new “humanistic capitalism.” Within this ap-
proach, “corporations [must] assume an active responsibility for creating a healthy
society and a habitable planet—not as a gesture to improve corporate image or as a
moralistically undertaken responsibility, but because it is the only reasonable long-
run interpretation of ‘good business.’”106 This ethical capitalism was to serve as an al-
ternative for private businesses, multinationals, and industrialists.107 Corporations
were seen as key actors in aid programs and had a responsibility to promote humane
and ethical values of democracy, prosperity, and progress.

Through a popular movement and a consumer boycott, the issue of baby formula
became part of this new approach aimed at generating ethical and humanistic modes
of global capital. The boycott created a junction between humanitarian concerns
about Third World hunger and international debates about the role of multinationals
through the issue of breastfeeding.108 While policymakers struggled in the national
and international spheres, the boycott succeeded in mobilizing governmental and in-
ternational agencies through public pressure and a global consumer movement. This
consumer movement may have lacked the power and efficiency to tackle the abuses
of global capital, but it offered a global response to the turmoil of the new market
capitalism. With multinational corporations operating largely without international
oversight, the Nestlé boycott added a new dimension to these international debates
through a popular movement, calling for a code of conduct focused on marketing
strategies.

With the international pressure of a global community supported by figures such
as Senator Kennedy, the World Health Organization and UNICEF sponsored an in-
ternational conference in Geneva from October 9 to 12, 1979, to discuss the problem
of baby feeding in the Third World. The meeting, which for the first time included

104 The Malaysian activist Anwar Fazal directly invoked the language of the NEIO in his speeches
and saw his work—as part of a non-governmental organization located in the Global South—as comple-
mentary to that of the NEIO. Fazal, “Consumerism: The Developing Challenge,” address at the Interna-
tional Organization of Consumers Unions at the Mauritius National Consumer Congress, Port Louis,
Mauritius, May 28–29, 1976.

105 Multinational corporations were sometimes even invited to run their own development projects
and collaborate with the UN. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Industry Cooperative Program
was one such example, established to facilitate development projects led by multinational agribusiness
firms and developing countries.

106 Willis W. Harman, “Humanistic Capitalism: Another Alternative,” Journal of Humanistic Psychol-
ogy 14, no. 1 (1974): 5–32.

107 Ibid.
108 “Taming Transnationals,” booklet, 1982, file 00903, box 183, WOW.

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non-governmental organizations such as War on Want and INFACT, called for the
development of an international code of conduct for the marketing of infant formula.
It specified the need to monitor marketing practices and for comprehensive labeling
of baby food products, avoiding any use of the deceptive terms for infant formula
that the companies had previously deployed, such as “humanized milk” and “materi-
alized milk.”109 Influenced by the rights discourse of the 1970s (expressed in docu-
ments such as the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutri-
tion of 1974), and as part of the UN International Year of the Child, the discussions
in 1979 centered on the nutritional rights of children and mothers. In the recommen-
dations drafted from the meeting, which would later become the basis for the Inter-
national Code of Marketing, WHO/UNICEF declared that it was “the right of every
child and every pregnant and lactating mother to be adequately nourished as a means
of attaining and maintaining physical and psychological health.” The two agencies
called upon both “national governments and the international community . . . to take
steps to ensure that children everywhere get a proper start in life on the basis of . . .
adequate nutrition.”110 Through the involvement of WHO/UNICEF, the problematic
marketing of infant formula was framed as a human rights violation.

WHO/UNICEF echoed many of the assumptions and anxieties already raised by
the 1974 Baby Killer report. These included the medical and psychological impor-
tance of supporting breastfeeding as well as the economic and cultural reasons for
doing so. Mostly, the international bodies emphasized, the problem of bottle-feeding
in the Global South was “part of the wider issues of poverty, lack of resources, social
injustice and ecological degradation.”111 According to the WHO/UNICEF recom-
mendations from 1979, the issue of breastfeeding in non-Western societies “cannot
be considered apart from social and economic development and the need for a new
international economic order.”112 The international community—including actors
such as intergovernmental organizations and NGOs—became responsible, therefore,
in keeping with the 1970s notion of minimal rights, for safeguarding and promoting
breastfeeding.113 In 1981, the 34th World Health Assembly endorsed the Interna-
tional Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes as a “minimum requirement in
all countries,” making it the first international law for the regulation of multinational
corporations.114 The United States, now led by the new Reagan administration, stood
alone in its opposition to the code.115 The code was adopted by many postcolonial

109 U.S. Senate, Marketing and Promotion of Infant Formula in the Developing Nations.
110 Joint WHO/UNICEF Meeting on Infant and Young Child Feeding, Geneva, 9–12 October 1979:

Statement, Recommendations, List of Participants (Geneva, 1979), 6, 7; Edward Baer and Leah Margulies,
“Infant and Young Child Feeding: An Analysis of the WHO/UNICEF Meeting,” Studies in Family Plan-
ning 11, no. 2 (1980): 72–75. The difficulties of wording the code and the tensions between the different
member countries trying to reach agreement on its status are discussed in Andrew Chetley, The Politics
of Baby Foods: Successful Challenges to an International Marketing Strategy (London, 1986), 75–88.

111 Joint WHO/UNICEF Meeting on Infant and Young Child Feeding, 6.
112 Ibid.
113 Moyn, The Last Utopia.
114 “Ideas for Action: The Baby Milk Issue,” New Internationalist, no. 110 (April 1982): 26.
115 For more on the Reagan administration’s opposition to the code and the criticism it generated,

see James E. Post, “Assessing the Nestle Boycott: Corporate Accountability and Human Rights,” Califor-
nia Management Review 27, no. 2 (1985): 113–131. Although the code took the form of a recommenda-
tion, activists still saw it as a success in regulating and limiting the power of multinational corporations.
“Delegation Report on WHO’s Intergovernmental Consultation on Infant Formula Code, Sept 25–26,
1980,” n.d., box 37, Action for Corporate Accountability, Affiliate Groups, MHSA.

1222 Tehila Sasson

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2016

countries and incorporated into their own domestic policies.116 It established an un-
precedented level of corporate accountability through which multinational businesses
could be defined and evaluated. Minimal as it may have been, the code connected
ethical issues, and more specifically human rights concerns, to multinational busi-
nesses, and bound corporations legally to the development project.117 Global justice
was to be achieved through an ethical form of regulated capitalism rather than
through state policy.

The success of the Baby Killer campaign ultimately forced Nestlé to change its mar-
keting strategies in the Global South. On January 25, 1984, the company signed an un-
precedented agreement with its non-governmental critics, represented by the Interna-
tional Nestlé Boycott Committee (INBC), which included American and British groups
as well as groups from other European countries. In the agreement, Nestlé pledged to
implement fully the WHO/UNICEF code, which called for health hazard warnings on
formula labels, revisions to the literature sent to doctors and mothers by the company,
and an end to the practice of providing personal gifts to health workers.118 In return,
the INBC recommended that the boycott be suspended, thus ending the seven-year
international consumer action against Nestlé products. Although the boycott was
relaunched in the late 1980s, when activists accused infant formula companies of once
again pushing their products and free samples in Third World clinics, the Baby Killer
campaign of the 1970s was a crucial episode in the global history of consumer activism,
humanitarianism, and ethical capitalism. Esther Peterson, a consumer activist and advi-
sor to Presidents Johnson and Carter, called the joint agreement “the most important
victory in the history of the international consumer movement.”119

WHILE THE CODE LACKED ANY REAL legal status, the Nestlé boycott was one of the
most successful consumer movements of the period in securing support from govern-
ments, international organizations, and ordinary people, and contributing to the rise
of fair trade. Indeed, its weaknesses notwithstanding, the boycott was effective in
pressing for new norms of ethical business. In this era of market and deregulated
capitalism, the movement held the promise of what Naomi Klein, in her landmark
book No Logo, saw as a network of cultural “jammers” and human rights activists
united on a single issue: restricting corporate power.120 As policymakers, activists,
and aid experts struggled to cope with the new global reach of the multinational cor-
poration in the national and international spheres, the boycotters succeeded in mobi-
lizing a new global citizen, one who contributed to the aid program against world
hunger through his or her power as a consumer.

116 “Loopholes,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, file 00903, box 183, WOW.
117 “Baby Milk Action: Baby Milk Wins Through,” leaflet, July 1981, file 00903, box 183, WOW.

Activists were of course aware of the weaknesses of such a code and its unabiding nature. “Infant For-
mula Promotion,” leaflet, May 1981, ibid.; “Breast Is Best: From Practice to Policy,” IBFAN action pack,
ibid.; “International Code,” IBFAN booklet, 1982, ibid.; “Loopholes.”

118 “Nestlé/INBC Joint Press Conference,” October 4, 1984, box 36, Action for Corporate Account-
ability, Affiliate Groups, MHSA.

119 Quoted in Johnson, “Confronting Corporate Power,” 324.
120 Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York, 1999).

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AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2016

At the same time, this global citizenship was not without limitations: rather than
calling for a structural change in the conditions that prevented Third World mothers
from bottle-feeding, the boycott focused on technical fixes and restrictions on the
market. Furthermore, it failed to account for the role of multinationals in labor
abuses and resource exploitation in Third World countries and instead centered on
the role of these countries in a global consumer society. While attempting to rally
against economic dependencies, the boycotters ended up enforcing a somewhat pa-
ternalistic argument, through which the cultural practices of Third World mothers
rather than macroeconomics became the cause of hunger in the Global South. It fo-
cused consumer behavior and essentialized it, instead of calling for development and
educational programs. In doing so, the boycott ran the risk of cementing a difference
between the “First World” and the “Third World,” epitomized in the bottle versus
the breast. This turn to market behavior overlooked the specific historical and post-
colonial conditions from which these gaps emerged. The market in fact had no his-
tory; instead, nature came to replace history as the main cause of difference.

The history of the Nestlé boycott reveals how during the 1970s, humanitarian ac-
tivism and human rights regulations became intimately connected with market capi-
talism. While the dangers of bottle-feeding had long been known, it was only in this
period that the problem was redefined as a moral and political issue and addressed
through the use of a boycott. Focused on economic dependencies rather than just
the problem of modernization, the campaign tried to directly involve private busi-
nesses and business experts in the aid industry, and to create an ethical form of capi-
talism. Rather than generating political mechanisms to limit the power of corpora-
tions, activists now called for an ethical market in which multinational corporations
would regulate their own practices. Within this new framework, the market was
transformed into a space for enforcing a global humanitarian ethics.

Tehila Sasson is a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research,
London, and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics
at the University of Cambridge. In 2017 she will join the History Department at
Emory University as an Assistant Professor. She is currently completing a book
manuscript with the working title We Are the World: The End of Empire and the
Rise of Global Humanitarianism, which traces how in the second half of the twen-
tieth century, ordinary people were mobilized to join a global community of aid.
She is the author of “From Empire to Humanity: The Russian Famine and the
Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism,” which appeared in the Jour-
nal for British Studies in July 2016. She is also working on an economic, legal, and
environmental history of the rights to ownership of natural resources and the ori-
gins of global environmental justice in the twentieth century.

1224 Tehila Sasson

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2016

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