When three polar bear cubs died in the Cologne zoo some time ago from bacterially polluted powdered milk sold for babies, the newspaper expressed indignation and compassion. Yet the fact that human babies are dying every day in countries of the Third World from the consequences of being fed with such powdered milk is registered by public opinion only when courts deal with the question. Have we become numb to human misery or have we only been deluded as to its scope and its causes?
I believe it is both: the sheer amount of misery and the sheer amount of lies about the origin of misery have made us numb.
Everyday we are overwhelmed with bulletins by the media, by politicians, and by company spokesman who, armed with allegedly objective arguments by "scientists", ascribe hunger and pauperization in the Third World to "overpopulation", "difficult climatic conditions" or even to the "stupidity of those concerned". Those who work in the media , as I do, can see very quickly that there are alternative but less desirable explanations for these things, and that there are solid political and economic reasons for the concealment of the real causes of hunger and misery.
The case of the Bottle Babies shows these real causes particularly clearly. Not least for this reason was it impossible to secure financial support for the film from television, state or even church authorities. "As far as we know, powdered milk above all saves lives." "It seems to us all they want to do is to attack the multinational corporations". These were among the reasons given for the refusals. Only when the film was completed and the topic had become "newsworthy" due to the Nestle court case, did a few television stations find it possible to show at least a few minutes of the film.
It is not difficult to see that the same forces that create hunger and misery seek to prevent the truth from being known. At a time when the technological and economic conditions exist to produce enough food for a multiple of the world population , when unemployment and mass misery co-exist with immense wealth , at such a time we cannot and must not be content with explaining such conditions by "difficult climatic condition", "overpopulation" or "stupidity" .
The real stupidity does not lie with the Third World mothers who are unable to read the instructions on the tins of powdered milk ,but with those who consider this to be the main cause of the deaths of bottle babies. It is just as necessary to combat "stupidity " caused and maintained by deception as it is necessary to combat illiteracy in the Third World. Our own "illiteracy " is that the mechanisms of the world economy are to us like the working of an aeroplane is to a child . Such ignorance , such regulated stupidity in our very "developed" countries is , as it always has been, a prerequisite for maintaining the conditions described in this booklet .
We should not take the easy way as regards solutions . Suggestions that Third World governments should simply put powdered milk imports under state control or prohibit them, or should more strictly supervise the activities of multinational companies, or subordinate the distribution of products such as baby foods to national health services - such suggestions are certainly valid in theory but they usually do not take int o account the true distribution of power in most developing countries . As an illustration, here are a few examples of what I experienced or heard while I filmed in Kenya.
The hospital in Nairobi where I was filming, and whose doctors and nurses gave me great support, had a small health education unit , which was about to complete a calendar containing colour pictures giving nutritional advice to mothers. One of the pictures planned was of a mother breast feeding her baby, with the caption : "Mother's milk is best for Baby". At the order of the Health Ministry this picture had to be removed as, according to the Ministry, i t was not yet proved that mother's milk was in fact better . How else can this attitude be explained than by the influence of interested milk companies within this Ministry?
Like many other Third World hospitals, the one in Nairobi was supplied with free powdered milk for clinical needs (in cases of premature births or of death of the mother, etc.). The side-effect of this seemingly disinterested generosity was the hospital's dependency on these gifts, inasmuch as the rather tight budget no longer provided for purchase of powdered milk. With these donations Nestle (just like other companies) paid for the right to advertize in the hospital with almost no restrictions - with posters and wall calendars (especially in maternity and pediatric clinics), with free samples and bottles for mothers who had just given birth, and in many cases even with visits by company employees at the mothers' bedside.
Those hospital doctors who tried to check the advance of powdered milk naturally did not like all this advertizing, and they decided one day to remove all the posters and calendars . Right the next day, one of the doctors told me, a Nestle representative arrived and threatened to stop the supplies unless the advertizing was allowed to continue . In this case, the doctors were not to be intimidated and Nestle had to give in, which was none too hard to do considering that the outsize Lactogen tins they had supplied were in themselves an effective advertisement.
Other doctors tell about banquets in Nairobi's Hilton Hotel organized by Nestle for foreign guests of the country's pediatric society, of one year's free supply of powdered milk for babies of doctors and other activities verging on outright bribery. These practices probably are among the more harmless in the armoury of multinational corporations. In case they fail, they could be backed up by the whole arsenal of power of these corporations, which is vastly superior to the economic power of most developing countries, whose governments are more and more interlinked and fused with the management of corporations and banks.
In the long run, no code of good behaviour by corporations, no prohibition of advertizing or any other cosmetic measures will prevent the shedding of blood in the dealings of the profit maximisers. The only thing to be done is to expose these practices: we must fearlessly point out how they originate and whom they benefit. We must help the victims - most effectively by combatting the causes of their misery in our own countries, because that is where it originates. We have to enable people to become aware of the situation and to change it .
The parents of my generation, when asked why they did not resist the crimes of fascism in my country, excused themselves with a bad conscience by pretending ignorance of them; if they had known, they maintained, they would have closed their eyes to them out of fear. We who are faced every day with the victims of present crimes will no longer be able to pretend ignorance, and any tacit tolerance of these crimes will make us accomplices.
January 1976
Peter Krieg maker of the film Bottle Babies (translated from the German by Dorothea Millwood)
