Nestlé is the largest publicly traded food and drink company and conglomerate. Nestlé has a range of diverse products that are popular and widespread, from Crunch Bars, quick dog food, and also, most controversially, water and baby formula.
If we can agree that we as people have the human right to life, then is it controversial to say that the right to food and water, the two most basic life-sustaining items needed to live, are also human rights? Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, former Ceo and chairman of Nestlé, might disagree as he claims that to view water as a human right is “extreme.” This might be no shock due to Nestlé’s unethical practices and blatant disregard for human rights. What I am referring to is the baby formula scandal; Nestlé in developing countries marketed baby formula as better for infants than breast milk, even having women dressed as nurses to market the formula when, in reality, they were not qualified medical professionals but rather saleswomen. Women could not afford the formula they believed was better for their children than the milk they produced and had to turn to dilute the formula with water, which often contaminated and stopped producing milk. It is estimated that 10,870,000 babies died from 1960 to 2015 due to their marketing, due to paying off doctors to say these claims were valid, all the while they profited millions of dollars off the suffering of others that they caused. Not only this, but Nestlé has also contaminated groundwater in the name of profit, went to other countries, and packed public groundwater for extremely cheap to package and sell at much higher prices. They have even been under lawsuit for child slave labor. In one case held in the US where Nestlé operates on the grounds of knowingly buying from farms using child slave labor, this was ultimately thrown out because the slave labor was not used inside the United States. Yet there is an undeniable moral deficiency to preach freedom in the states yet allow a company that is known to benefit from child slave labor and even the deaths of children to operate and make a profit in the US; freedom at home and slavery abroad is clearly a hypocritical philosophy in need of complete revision.
What can we take away from this? Even in a world surrounded by talk of liberty, freedom, and democracy, it is essential to fight for the rights of others, not to support companies who ignore their corporate social responsibility, and to be cognizant of what we can do and who we can support and uplift to cultivate an equal world.