‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies, 1968-1988”

Knapp, Bryan V.

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Year:: 2015
Contributor:: Knapp, Bryan V (creator); Self, Robert (Director); Rockman, Seth (Reader); Borgwardt, Elizabeth (Reader); Brown University. History (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: infant formula; Nestle; development; Congress; earthrise; breastmilk; Capitalism; Globalization; Infant formula industry; Nestlé; Boycotts; Economic development; World Health Organization; Food; Breastfeeding; Breast milk
Extent:: 12, 411 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0CF9NGH

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Abstract:: This dissertation is a study of a boycott during the 1970s and 80s against the largest food company on the planet, when activists accused Nestlé of killing babies in developing countries with its infant formula products. Nestlé countered that it and the formula industry actually saved babies, contributed to local development, and solved many of the world’s economic and health problems. At its most concrete, my project focuses on infant health and political struggles over the private choices and basic economic opportunities of ordinary people. At its most abstract, the work demystifies the multinational corporation at a moment, the 1970s, when it entered American consciousness as a global source of social injustice. Corporations like Nestlé achieved their global position by infiltrating and commodifying one of the most intimate realms of human life – the political site of a woman’s body and her feeding child. Which, from one perspective, demonstrates serious attempts to incorporate survival commodities and the processes of life itself. The dissertation explores the international boycott in order to investigate concepts of growth and development, ideas of universal world health, and the problems of regulating multinational corporations. Its five chapters trace the rise of baby food politics from the birth of formula manufacturing in the late nineteenth century to a World Health Organization code of conduct in the 1980s. The international politics of baby feeding involved governments, the UN, activist networks, and ordinary mothers around the world. The dissertation draws on archival sources such as congressional and UN documents, corporate records, health professional accounts and USAID research, church papers, court cases and an extensive activist archive. Its actors include NGOs, MNCs (Multinational Corporations), activists, health experts and countless families in places like Nairobi and Bogota where Nestlé’s efforts to sell formula coincided with the long process of decolonization.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)

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Rights: In Copyright
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Knapp, Bryan V., "‘The Biggest Business in the World’: The Nestlé Boycott and the Global Development of Infants, Nations, and Economies, 1968-1988”" (2015). History Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0CF9NGH

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History Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the History department.
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