An exploration of growth, development and the total privatization of the species.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction:
The Biggest Business in the World ……………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1:
"Capitalism Begins at the Mother's Breast": Infant Formula, the Rise of Scientific Motherhood, and the Politics of Hunger ………………………………………………...24
Chapter 2:
“The White Man’s Milk Powder”: The Nestlé Boycott, Corporate Accountability, and Saving Underdeveloped Infants …………………………………………………………85
Chapter 3:
"The Business of Life Itself": The Formula Industry Defends Corporate Morality and Grows the World's Children …………………………………………………………...160
Chapter 4:
The Global Baby and America's Multinational Moment ………………………………229
Chapter 5:
What is World Health? The WHO International Code ………………………………...295
Epilogue:
The Liquids of Life …………………………………………………………………….363
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………377
INTRODUCTION
The Biggest Business in the World
"The old hierarchies of protection and dependency no longer exist, there are only free contracts, freely terminated. The marketplace, which had long ago expanded to included relations of production, has now expanded to include all relationships."[1]
"A nation grows out of its children."[2]
"Breast milk is a universal food."[3]
The landmark global struggles of the twentieth century—capitalism vs. communism, imperialism vs. decolonization, traditionalism vs. modernity, the West vs. the Global South, scarcity vs. abundance, the so-called welfare state vs. neo-liberalism—converged in the competing images of two babies in the 1970s. In one, there is an emaciated African infant, ribs prominent, large skull too heavy for its body, severely malnourished and near death, lying on her back next to her brother's grave. On the grave, sticking out of piled dirt, rested a baby bottle, there because of its supposed magical powers that would accompany the dead infant into the afterlife. In the other image, a healthy white baby with fat, rosy cheeks, sits next to a canister of infant formula, smiling and ready to grow and develop according to proper growth charts. Anti-formula activists distributed the first image in order to gain support for a global boycott of infant formula sold in the Global South by multinational corporations. Food and pharmaceutical companies offered the second image as an advertisement for their scientifically manufactured baby foods.
Over the last century, a range of political agendas has focused on the nursing mother and baby in order to advance, or to challenge, feminism, capitalism, humanitarianism, and environmentalism. The most crucial intervention—and the one at the heart of this project—was the commercial development of alternatives to breast milk. The very name “infant formula” suggests a techno-industrial approach to sustaining babies in ways that, depending on who was making the argument, liberated or devalued women, helped or harmed standards of living in the developing world, and promoted or impeded global environmental sustainability. The Nestlé Corporation invented powdered infant food in the late nineteenth century and immediately attracted the attention of maternalist organizations and consumer groups. The emergence of scientifically produced infant foods coincided with declining breastfeeding rates and alarming infant mortality worldwide, which created ideal conditions for a new kind of international social justice movement. Nearly a century of contest crystalized in the 1970s, in a conflict between global activists and corporate giants over the sale of infant formula in the so-called developing world.
This book narrates the international boycott of Nestlé in the 1970s and 1980s 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 manuscript 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, and countless families in places like Nairobi and Bogota where Nestlé’s efforts to sell formula coincided with the long process of decolonization. Nestlé’s formula marketing was explosive for reasons having to do with domestic politics in the United States, as well as the concurrent (and often conflicting) agendas of the United States foreign policy and the developmental programs of groups like the UN and WHO.
The anti-bottle factions articulated a particular set of criticisms, and the formula industry spent millions countering them. Consumer groups blamed high infant morbidity and mortality rates in less developed countries (LDCs) on the multinational corporations. They amassed evidence that attempted to show how formula companies were marketing manufactured commodities to poor women who could not use the product properly or safely. Because of poor sanitation and unreliable water supply, and the high price of the formula, babies were contracting diseases and dying. Boycott activists maintained that breastfeeding was free, safe and healthy. The corporations, on the other hand, denied these charges and endeavored to show that their legal products were perfectly safe and that activists, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others were acting paternalistically. According to the corporations, women chose the products under their own free will, they were not coerced, and marketing techniques were necessary in order to provide essential information. The formula manufacturers believed that they, contrary to the activists' claims, were making the world healthier. They portrayed activists as anti-capitalist and communist, and themselves as defenders of the free market and the right to choose.[4]
In the United States, three major developments focused attention on Nestlé and facilitated the boycott. The first development was the rise of feminism, and especially the women’s health movement, over the course of the twentieth century, but particularly in the early 1970s. Whether knowingly or not for individual women, infant feeding had become a feminist issue and a highly charged political struggle. Anthropologist, mother, and activist Penny Van Esterik, who once debated the formula companies and worked for a USAID infant feeding study, considered infant formula in terms of "the sexual division of labor" and "women's productive and reproductive activities."[5] For many in the women’s health movement, breastfeeding confirmed “a woman's power to control her own body and challenges medical hegemony," Van Esterik claimed. Scientific motherhood, advice to women from men, and the rise of the expert discredited women, however, removed them from child-rearing and feeding decisions, and pathologized pregnancy, birth and motherhood. In contrast, some feminists argued that breastfeeding and its ideology existed as a form of social control – aimed to force women back into the home. Women challenged patriarchal and capitalist hegemony, inserting their bodies and voices into and sometimes against the rising neoliberal tide.[6] Therefore, "the decision not to spend cash on breastmilk substitutes" constituted "a rejection of a consumption pattern forcing women to rely on delocalized, industrially produced foods." Breastfeeding became a radical choice, a rejection of the dominant paradigm, avoiding the "pressure to buy," and creating a true locavore movement.[7]
Second, the growth of corporate power transformed American life and the rise of the MNC became a heated issue for unions, consumer groups, and elected officials. Women’s groups fought back against the incorporation of their bodies into male-centered capitalist markets. Echoing anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, historian Linda Blum noted that there was no "noncommodified experience[s] of our bodies."[8] In the 1970s, along with historian Harry Magdof's work and Marxist economist Stephen Hymer's, capitalism as imperialistic and directly leading to social and economic injustice, flourished.[9] Capitalism was to blame for the world’s ills, and burgeoning corporations demonstrated the worst kinds of abuses, leading, many imagined, to the destruction of bodies, environments and whole societies. America discovered global “Big Business” during Vietnam, when reports of Agent Orange and arms manufacturers circulated. The "code words Vietnam and Watergate" joined Big Business and Big Government - "in short the Establishment Power Structure" presented fearsome ideas of power and un-health.[10] Congress, the UN and the EU investigated MNCs for more than a decade, during what might be called the “multinational moment,” most notably by Frank Church’s Senate probe into their global operations. Many critics of entrenched, victorious capitalism after 1989 dreamed of radical alternatives to the world political economic status quo.[11]
Third, the rise of the environmental movement created a new discourse about development, one that challenged post-World War II Western confidence in global industrialization. In the age of atomic destruction, oil crises, and Paul Ehrlich, environmentalists asked whether the planet could sustain additional decades if not centuries of industrial growth. Today’s current climate change debates should help us appreciate apocalyptic thinking in the 1970s. For those concerned with baby food problems, politics and economics existed at the center of their anxieties, focused directly on "four spikes": "population growth, consumption of resources, carbon gas emissions, and the mass extinction of species."[12] The tone here resembled Ehrlich's Population Bomb, where overpopulation outlined by true science spelled the end of days.[13] Ehrlich's prescription, though, converged on total fascism, calling for sterilization for people with too many children. Ehrlich screamed the end of times, due to humanity’s almost-unified propensity to procreate.[14] Environmentalists and anticapitalist political activists, inside and outside the UN system, voiced the loudest alarm about saving the planet and questioning the impulses behind modernity and development.
All three of the foregoing gave significant impetus, and rhetoric, to the infant formula debates. However, the Nestlé boycott itself emerged as a global phenomenon for a number of quite specific reasons. During the Cold War, the US commitment to free market capitalism translated into a pledge to raising global standards of living. The Reagan Administration argued that it could not support the Code because it would be "an unwarranted invasion of the freedom of men and women to engage in peaceful exchange." At the United Nations, U. S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick explained that Americans wanted to "discourage the development by the UN of similar codes for other products."[15] Developed countries, and organizations like the World Bank, saw nutrition projects as essential for both development and national security, especially during a time of postcolonial critiques emerging in the Global South. Healthy bodies and infant feeding were essential for this vision. With the rise of state observations of healthy children, organizations realized that health and cleanliness contributed to national development. Bodies required improvement, as did national economies. Contemporaneous critics like historian Anna Davin explored the importance of motherhood and infant health for national power within this particular framework.[16] Her investigations uncovered "the connection between 'the health of the nation' and 'the wealth of the nation,’" and recognized that “population was power.” The reproduction of the workforce within an international division of labor became a problem of inequality between developing and developed countries, according to many of the activists involved, and framed the biopolitics and geopolitics of the Nestlé boycott.[17]
Several major themes in twentieth-century global history emerge in this study. First, the success of corporate entities in the commodification of nature, especially food supplies, created a system in which human survival itself was a matter of market forces more than biology. When milk for babies became a consumer good, it signified the capacity of global capitalism to commodify the most elemental necessities of life. Formula companies made money on that early separation of baby from mother. Profits soared when bottles proliferated. Through this process, planned and materialized, companies and health professionals removed the baby from the mother, and the mother's alienation from the product of her own labors, that is, her own child. Many activists saw companies as producing babies for a system predicated on private property and the accumulation of wealth. Survival had become privatized. The infant formula industry universally believed that they helped babies grow and develop, provided proper nutrition, and solved scarcity through open markets. Bristol-Myers testified that they were in the business of life itself.
Second, there was always resistance to this development, whether on the part of American feminists, UN aid workers, or African mothers. Both Akira Iriye's Global Community and Margaret Keck's and Kathryn Sikkink's Activists Beyond Borders contribute to our understanding of the politics of this transnational resistance. Iriye sought to discover why there has been a dramatic increase in the number of international organizations after World War II."[18] Keck and Sikkink, political scientists and Latin Americanists, instructed our understanding of what they call transnational advocacy networks (TANs), which are groups of activists "distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values" that motivate their activism against various targets.[19] Activists at the time, embodied by the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT), hoped to reign-in MNCs and force them to recognize their responsibility and their "global citizenship."[20] International legal expert Sol Picciotto wrote about this era, "the pressures to adopt global standards of responsibility for TNCs were generally channeled into the formulation of non-binding guidelines or codes by intergovernmental organizations."[21] Global corporations may have possessed vast power. [22] But they operated without clear sovereignties, and not without challenges to corporate prerogatives.
Third, the problems of scarcity and abundance vis-à-vis environment became a pressing international issue that exploded in the 1970s. Increasingly, many studies explore what some have called "species solidarity," a global consciousness, or even the "globalization of the world picture," according to historian Benjamin Lazier.[23] Indeed, activists, politicians and capitalists visualized the entire globe as a place for struggles over influence that required expert attention in order save the world from ecological destruction, famine, and intense poverty. Conceptions of the earth, like the changing conception of earth from an earlier era based images of our planet from space, explored in Donald Worster's "Vulnerable Earth" essay, contribute to an intellectual history of earth-centered thinking or global consciousness. Marxist geographer David Harvey studied the "geopolitics of capitalism" and outlined the structural problems of capitalism to human well-being.[24] For him and many others, the stakes of unsustainability were ecological destruction and threats to the existence of human life on this planet.[25] I situate my study within this conversation by analyzing contemporaneous struggles over growth and ecological limits and the discourses that surrounded them, but problematize the conversation by claiming that “growth,” as rhetoric and practical strategy, was the dominant view that followed infant, corporations and entire nations.[26]
One of the key strategies of this study is to place colonial and postcolonial African history, and its emphasis on capitalism and development, in conversation with both US and global history. To that end, this research engages with historians like Timothy Burke, Fred Cooper and Richard Sklar, who focus on Africa, while simultaneously engaging with literatures on neocolonial exploitation and western development. Advertising and an understanding of product and brand identification reached into rural and urban areas, integrating villages and cities into the larger global economy. Cooper illuminated a particular node of the African experience within the complicated global economy when he presented a photograph captioned "Modernizing the African family; a nurse lectures mothers on infant feeding in a clinic in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1959.”[27] To colonial officials – and many nationalists – women were the key to transforming African culture; if they could be taught lessons in child rearing and household management and were properly supervised, they would raise a new generation of Africans adapted to modern life." Speaking to the neocolonial framework, Richard Sklar wrote that critics of pervasive postcolonial oppression “need to explain the persistence of exploitation despite the passing of colonialism and other overtly imperialistic forms of political control." [28] He contributed to that explanation in his influential essay “Postimperialism: A Class Analysis of Corporate Expansion,” based on multinational mining companies in Zambia.[29] This book moves beyond these studies and details one important aspect of the postimperialist, transcontinental ruling class. For historian Timothy Burke, these locally-trained and previously colonial bureaucrats and intermediaries evinced a "mission" that still lurked "at the heart of many similar contemporary neocolonial institutions, from the World Bank to the Peace Corps," and, I argue, NGO activists with visions of bodily health and improvement, and other Westerners concerned with infant morbidity and mortality.[30]
This work also wrestles with a number of seemingly self-evident keywords. “Development,” “growth,” and “hunger” were not objective descriptors of material conditions, but contested terrain for various historical actors to make claims. For example, nutrition expert Alan Berg understood that improved nutrition of babies and children also led to improved economic growth, and citizens’ contributions to the national economy, to GDP. Certainly that framing is how he pitched funding projects to the World Bank.[31] Still, many people, on various sides of the political debates, viewed underdevelopment as pathology. Growth and health, then, seemed to exist as some sort of halcyon, with growth a unifying, universal language; many others saw growth as a disease, a sickness like cancer. And yet, poor people with poor diets fit into economists' equations with the ultimate aim of improving growth and productivity, improving the integration of LDCs into the world economic community.[32] Robert Constanza offered a Gross Progress Indicator (GPI) as an alternative to GDP as a measure of health. For him, "peak genuine progress" occurred in 1978, and since then the ecological and social costs of growth have "outweighed the benefits."[33] The proliferation of quantitative metrics like GNP is something that we as historians must interrogate, recognizing the development and deployment of such metrics to be argumentative not objective.
The study is influenced by commodity histories such as Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power. Commodity histories are valuable for several reasons. For one, they can demonstrate the real world historical changes that have transformed eating food from a question of pure survival to one of both pleasure and commodification and placed much of the world's population at the mercy of corporate prerogatives. Processed foods, packaged in ever-diverse units for sale, became one of modernity's principal indicators.[34] For Mintz, food, diet and modernity converged with "the strangely imperceptible attrition of people's control over what they eat, with the eater becoming the consumer of mass-produced food rather than the controller and cook of it."[35] Secondly, commodities such as sugar, baby food or cotton reveal local and global connections. Sugar commodification was more than enormous – it changed the world, placed Africans in the West Indies, led to the rise of industrial capitalism, shook nations to their core, led to revolutions, and contributed to shifts in social relations and work disciplines in the Old World.[36] And third, for the period after World War II, commodity studies demonstrate that states and international organizations increasingly sought ways to regulate and monitor food. In this story of global infant formula, states struggled to ensure food and product safety, while large corporations often outpaced these efforts. International organizations focused on corporations and the commodities they produced, especially when concerned about global health and underdeveloped areas of the world.
Milk is ideal for such a study, as nursing practices have been studied and politicized in many different registers. At the same time, as the basis of the mammalian classification, breastmilk is a human constant that lends itself to a global history. Historian Deborah Valenze wrote, "Breast milk is a universal food because all infants possess the capability to digest it."[37] The question remains: What happens when you replace humanity's universal food with an industrially manufactured one? In Switzerland, testifying in the Nestlé libel trial about formula marketing, Dr. Derrick Jelliffe used the word "occidentogenic," or derived from Western cultural influences.[38] He also coined the term “commerciogenic malnutrition” to describe the juncture of illness and corporate food. Thus, for him the problem was cultural, western, part imperialist and commercial - in fact all these lumped into a form of occidental imperialism.[39] For Valenze, modern milk conquered territory, energy and ordinary people’s eating habits. Milk and milk-derivatives became central to human survival. "The commodity of milk today has triumphed as a universal icon of modern nutrition, despite all attempts to deny it supremacy."[40] But even more important, recall that coming out of dairy-rich Switzerland, Nestlé SA became the largest food company on earth built on the productive capacity of cows.
Chapter One, “Capitalism Begins at the Mother’s Breast,” details the rise of scientific motherhood, maternalist ideology, and the politics of breastfeeding. Issues of the family existed alongside the rise of the infant formula industry coming out of the late nineteenth century. The chapter also highlights the beginning of Nestlé SA and the company’s “corporate soul” centered on baby feeding and nurturing. How the “little nest” (Nestlé) became the largest food company based on baby food forms part of my story. The activist line remained as follows throughout the controversy: doctors applied "Western solutions to Third World situations with often disastrous consequences."[41] And yet, this political situation would be contested from many different sides, and remained contingent no matter the local circumstances or the personal choices of ordinary women.
Chapter Two, “The White Man’s Milk Powder,” covers the central actors of the Nestlé boycott, and the broader anti-corporate, social justice and corporate democracy activists, most of whom queried the growth versus limits problem. These activists always brought together ecology, capitalism and overpopulation into the same conversations. Further, they worried about starving African babies and shocking infant mortality rates, while also possessing a conception of an entire planet that needed to be saved. This chapter follows specific activists and their rising political radicalism in the last 1960s and 1970s, shareholder democracy movements and the larger focus on corporate accountability.
Chapter Three, “The Business of Life Itself,” considers the corporate battles to contain these boycotts, international activism against their prerogatives, and institutional investigations into their activities.[42] The corporations visualized a One World based on free markets and corporate sovereignty. They possessed visions of infant, family, economic and environmental health based on total growth as the solution to many of the problems facing societies in the 1970s. Food corporations, for one, imagined growth as the definitive answer to famine and scarcity. My manuscript places these political, social and cultural struggles within this tension between growth and scarcity. I argue that the companies at first tried to ignore the growing international boycott, and then implemented a strategy to counter, and defeat, the boycott at every conceivable turn. Sophisticated public relations campaigns began shifting the discourse of the boycott, swayed large institutional boycotters such as the United Method Church to abandon the cause, and agitated for an industry place within global public health policy and regulation within the United Nations, World Health Organization and state level public health agencies.
Chapter Four, “Growing the Global Baby: Nations, International Organizations, and America's Multinational Moment,” details the institutional frameworks that endeavored to investigate and contain multinational corporations, marketing and distribution in the realm of food and infant feeding, environmental problems and an almost-universal anxiety about overpopulation. Thus, the "Multinational Moment" included state investigations into these corporations and their role in food and energy distribution and national security; additionally, the United Nations established an international body to study transnational corporations within the field of human rights; and the activist community, including church-led social gospel groups, increasingly targeted corporations to pressure the MNCs for social responsibility and for complicity in crimes, pollution, pesticides, infant mortality and other perceived social ills.[43] This chapter explores the multinational moment through U.S. Congress, federal Departments, and the UN. This narrative include postcolonial nations, the non-aligned movement and the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which appeared as the last institutional attempt to reign-in economic disparities and the corporate power of the Global North. My argument contributes to sociologist Nitsan Chorev’s analysis of the shift from the NIEO’s anticolonial impulse to a totalized neoliberal political economic, cultural and public health model.[44]
Chapter 5, “What is World Health? The WHO International Code,” investigates the Code negotiations in Geneva and the lone “no” vote against it. Initially, the Code was supposed to be a regulation, a first step toward corralling global corporate capitalism. Instead, the Code became a recommendation, its language one of offering suggestions. The companies, allied with most developed nations, successfully limited its scope. The Code stipulated, among many other things, that company representatives could not meet directly with consumers, that public advertising should be prohibited, and that companies could not disseminate free samples. Article 4.1 of the Code, for example, specifies that informational materials should emphasize the superiority of breastfeeding over bottle-feeding and that "such materials should not use any pictures or text which may idealize the use of breastmilk substitutes." Article 4.3 mandates that health care facilities could not be used to promote formula. It also states that national governments should be responsible for passing legislation which forces implementation; no corporate marketing in the health care system; no fake nurses or company workers in contact with mothers; removing the commission/incentives system from formula salespeople and marketers; warning labels on products, and labels without pictures of smiling, healthy babies.[45] As companies continued to violate this Code, and still do, pressure groups monitor industry activities around the world and compile reports within the auspices of WHO/UNICEF. Adherents of the Code hailed the negotiations as a momentous occasion. Even today the WHO Code is viewed as a model of civil action possibilities. Critics of the Code claimed that it was "consistently biased toward centralized government control and against the free market and civil liberties." Only one country in the world voted against implementation of the Code: Ronald Reagan's United States.[46]
The boycott officially ended in 1984. However, because the international boycott coalition perceived that Nestlé continued to violate the WHO Code, the boycott resumed in 1988. It continues today, with a "Boycott Nestlé Week" held every year. INFACT worked under the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), which now includes over 200 organizations in over 100 countries with regional offices on every continent save Antarctica. Still, the media storm over infant formula has largely died down.[47] More than that, Nestlé’s profits have grown rapidly, as has the formula industry’s as a whole. In the Epilogue, “The Liquids of Life,” I draw some conclusions about this problem, assess the boycott’s efficacy and limitations, and briefly talk about formula marketing today. Nestlé, too, aims to patent natural growing products and privatize water resources around the world. All formula companies market formula in ways that violate the Code. Therefore, showing how reform activism in an incorporated age falls short is a necessary project.
The politics of baby food and breastmilk existed at all because corporations, states, international organizations and women themselves fought for the terrain of what George Gilder termed "the future of capitalism." And here, inexorably, capitalism entwined with feeding regimes, survival strategies and the convergence of history and biology. In the 1970s, women across the world felt the invisible hand all over their bodies, and they demanded more of a say about how they fed their babies, constructed their families, and managed their individual survival strategies. Corporations, through marketing and various distribution techniques, tried to influence their decisions. Market openness, whether continental or global, has been a central story in humanity's political and social organizations over the last five hundred years. But where has this expansion left us, as a body? I hope this book contributes to an answer, showing that the domestication of humanity as an imagined global species has harnessed the imperial destructiveness of a rampant bio-organism on a specific, embodied biosphere. Capitalism or no, people in the late 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s developed both radical and reformist answers to that destructiveness, and they began by saving babies and trying to regulate multinational corporations in an effort to save the world.
[1] Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1978), 278. See also, The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
[2] George Newman, Infant Mortality: A Social Problem (1906), quoted in Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 133.
[3] Deborah Valenze, Milk: a Local and Global History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 288.
[4] Fred D. Miller, Jr., Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Infant Formula Controversy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), 5-15; S. Prakash Sethi, Multinational Corporations and the Impact of Public Advocacy on Corporate Strategy: Nestle and the Infant Formula Controversy (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1994), 1-25; Infant Formula Action Coalition, now Center for Corporate Responsibility, http://www.stocorporateabuse.org/cms/page1128.cfm (accessed May 15 2011); Senate Committee on Human Resources, Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, Marketing and Promotion of Infant Formula in the Developing Nations, 95th Cong., 2nd sess., May 2 1978.
[5] Penny Van Esterik, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), 68-79.
[6] My definition of neoliberalism is an international system of economic liberalization that has especially consolidated influence since the 1980s. I take it to mean policies such as deregulation, free trade and extensive privatization.
[7] Linda Blum noted that "mothering promoted by late capitalist restructuring" created paradoxes in the imagination, and in social spaces such as workplaces, which were accompanied bodily disciplines and surveillance of normal, healthy people in the world. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 295-301. On capitalism and the body, see Michel Foucault: "But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only it if is both a productive body and a subjected body." Quote in Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 24-7, see also 54-5.
[8] Linda Blum, At the Breast, 297. See John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc., Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[9] See Stephen Hymer, The Multinational Corporation: A Radical Approach, Robert Cohen ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Magdoff wrote prolifically during the 1960s and 1970s and joined many, including Howard Bell, in analyzing and dissecting the rising new regime that included the United States, the West, and global capitalist networks as a mappable geography of hegemony. See Magdoff's body of work for examples of this scholarship the prevailed throughout the academy and the popular press during the multinational moment: Harry Magdoff, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); The Age of Imperialism; the Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (Monthly Review Press, 1969); The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981); The End of Prosperity: The American Economy in the 1970s (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). Add to this analysis of neoliberal market society, on "the private earth," Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man; Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and Ernest Mandel's work, which exemplified the literature on capitalism and disruption during the multinational moment, all of which asked, in so many words, what is going on? Ernest Mandel, Europe Vs. America: Contradictions of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Late Capitalism (London ; New York: Verso, 1999); Long Waves of Capitalist Development: a Marxist Interpretation: Based on the Marshall Lectures Given at the University of Cambridge (London: New York: Verso, 1995); Power and Money: a Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy (London ; New York: Verso, 1992); The Second Slump: a Marxist Analysis of Recession in The seventies (London: New Left Books, 1978).
[10] See for Vietnam Le Thi Nham Tuyet and Annika Johansson, "Impact of Chemical Warfare with Agent Orange on Women's Reproductive Lives in Vietnam: A Pilot Study," Reproductive Health Matters 9, no. 18 (November 1, 2001): 156–164. For business, oil, Vietnam and environmentalism and these convergences in the United States, see Hal Rothman, Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000).
[11] For an excellent look at "neoliberalism" and the idea of 1989, see Johanna Bockman, "The Long Road to 1989: Neoclassical Economics, Alternative Socialisms, and the Advent of Neoliberalism," Radical History Review no. 112 (January 1, 2012): 9. Bockman argued "politicians and their economic experts presented a disembodied capitalist utopia - that the market freed from the state and the Communist Party would finally thrive - supported, in their minds, by neoclassical economics.” C. L. R. James's idea of state capitalism, and even a recent Economist cover story and subsequent attention to "the crisis of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with the rise of a powerful new form of state capitalism in emerging markets," which detailed "emerging-market multinationals." See mapping the geographies of global capitalism: "Big Brother Is Back," The Economist (Accessed May 15, 2013), http://www.economist.com/news/business/21565629-france-and-germany-lead-revival-state-intervention-big-brother-back. "China's State Capitalism: Not Just Tilting at Windmills," The Economist, October 6, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21564235; "Economist Debates: State Capitalism," The Economist (Accessed May 15, 2013), http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/221; "Emerging-market Multinationals: The Rise of State Capitalism," The Economist, January 21, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21543160. For a vital discussion of this subject, note the essay by Christopher Phelps, "C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism," in Nelson Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein, Nelson. American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. See also C.L.R. James, C. L. R. American Civilization, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993).
[12] The apocalyptic visions of the 1970s and 1980s represented humanity's fear of itself. Cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek outlined the contemporary vision of apocalypse in Living in the End Times, writing with an eye on our collective "apocalypse at the gates.” Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), section "Apocalypse at the Gates," and the four spikes outlined by Ed Ayres, quoted in Holmes Rolston, "Four Spikes, Last Chance," Conservation Biology 12, No. 2 (2001): 584-5. Our current apocalypse surrounds us and is right in front of us: "ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives. At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point." Ayres wrote that, "we are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don't really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming.'”
[13] Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).
[14] See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Decentralized Despotism and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012); The Myth of Population Control; Family, Caste, and Class in an Indian Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Matthew Connelly, "Population Control Is History: New Perspectives on the International Campaign to Limit Population Growth," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 122–147; Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
[15] Charles S. Pearson, ed., Multinational Corporations, Environment and the Third World (Durham, 1987), 141-44; Miller, Out of the Mouths of Babes, 75-85.
[16] Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop, no. 5 (April 1, 1978): 9–65.
[17] These issues, as historians such as Odd Arne Westad have shown, surfaced during anticolonial independence movements after World War II. How to structure the economy and society lay at the heart of state, industrial and global concerns. See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also books on modernity and development, such as David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, America in the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Giovanni Arrighi, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, Contradictions of Modernity, v. 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Allan Pred, Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent, Hegemony and Experience (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
[18] Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 130. Iriye referred to Eric Hobsbawm's idea of the 1970s as a giving rise to a "'transnational economy' in the world, symbolized by the mushrooming of multinational business enterprise," a development that undeniably brought forth questions about "the diminishing role of the state.” For a new study of multinational enterprises and the state from the perspective of arguing for a "complex understanding" of these relationships, see Vinnie Oliveiro, "The United States, Multinational Enterprises, and the Politics of Globalization," in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). For a recent scholarly lament for the diminution of U.S. manufacturing capacity (especially a contradictory call for increased automobile manufacturing), see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
[19] Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1998).
[20] Sol Picciotto, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism: International Corporate Law and Financial Market Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 193-198.
[21] See Picciotto, Regulating Global Corporate Capitalism, 50n. He noted that some of the agreements "had a broad scope, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) Tripartite Declaration of 1977, the 1976 Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises of the OECD, and the aborted UN Code of Conduct for TNCs."
[22] Raymond Vernon, in his long-running study of multinational enterprise at Harvard's business school, mentioned codes of conduct for industry in a report to the president. But he claimed that self-regulation rarely achieved the changes required in a world quickly becoming overcrowded with people, waste, and toxic chemicals. See his work on two reports to the president, collected in Raymond Vernon, The Economic and Political Consequences of Multinational Enterprise: An Anthology (Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1972), Chandler Papers, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, 188-89.
[23] See Benjamin Lazier, "Earthrise: or, The Globalization of the World Picture," American Historical Review, 116, No. 3, 2011; for species solidarity, see Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, "Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians," The American Historical Review 115, No. 5 (Dec., 2010): 1342-1363; and Sophus A. Reinert, "Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline of Enlightenment Italy," American Historical Review 115, No. 5 (Dec., 2010): pp. 1395-1425. For the global vision of the activists, capitalists and politicians in my story and the impact of seeing images of Earth, note Donald Worster's influential essay "The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History," Environmental Review 11, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), 87-103, but also Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, Conn., 2008). Additionally, perhaps reflecting a renewed interest in business history, political economy and the structures of Big Capitalism, make special note of Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, (New York, 2010); also review Frederick L. Kirschenmann, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher (Lexington, KY, 2010); on implied cumulative impacts and global ecological integration, see Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CN, 1972); Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 2004), and Crosby's account of people in a solar system, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York, 2006).
[24] See for example Harvey's lecture course on Capital, http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/ (accessed May 1, 2014); and see David Harvey, "The geopolitics of capitalism," first published in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, 1985, in Harvey, Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh, 2001), 344. Harvey writing in 1985 urged a total “replacement of the capitalist mode of production, that expansionary and technologically dynamic process of circulation . . . as a necessary condition for human survival."
[25] Studies not cited elsewhere that have influenced this essay in the fields of ecological history (including photosynthesis!), structures and cultures of capitalism, and the juncture of intellectual history, political economy and ecology are, Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, 1977); Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque, 1994); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); on global capitalism, "creative destruction," and notions of the survivability of capitalism, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1942); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York, 1975); Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York, 2005).
[26] I hope to add a world history for a global age, bringing back a large analysis with specific historical actors to explain what I think is the ultimate universality: a distinct humanity. For historians Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, in a widely read essay title "World History in a Global Age," universal modernity as an idea faded into "an integrated world of multiple and multiplying modernities.” See Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1, 1995): 1034–1060.
[27] Fred Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123.
[28] Richard L. Sklar, African Politics in Postimperial Times: The Essays of Richard L. Sklar, Classic Authors and Texts on Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002).
[29] Richard Sklar advanced the scholarly formulation that multinational corporations were instruments of the transnational corporate bourgeoisie, and other state bureaucratic actors. The tone of Sklar's 1976 article expressed the under-examined nature of the multinational corporation and the surprise that political science and political theory had yet theorized or effectively analyzed the central importance of transnational business enterprise.
[30] Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Body, Commodity, Text (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
[31] Alan Berg, The Nutrition Factor: Its Role in National Development (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1973); Malnourished People: A Policy View (Washington: World Bank, 1981); Berg and Nevin Scrimshaw, Nutrition, National Development, and Planning: Proceedings of an International Conference (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973). See also Meredith Fort, Mary Anne Mercer and Oscar Gish, Sickness and Wealth: the Corporate Assault on Global Health (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004) and Jim Yong Kim, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
[32] Devi Sridhar, "Economic Ideology and Politics in the World Bank: Defining Hunger," New Political Economy 12, no. 4 (2007): 499–516, 500.
[33] See in particular Jean-Paul Fitouss, Amartya Kumar Sen, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up (ReadHowYouWant.com, 2011), cited in Ida Kubiszewski, Robert Costanza, Carol Franco, Philip Lawn, John Talberth, Tim Jackson, and Camille Aylmer, "Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving Global Genuine Progress," Ecological Economics 93 (September 2013): 57–68.
[34] Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), 156.
[35] Mintz, 211.
[36] Mintz, 156.
[37] Valenze, 288-89.
[38] Jane Cottingham, Bottle Babies: A Guide to the Baby Foods Issue, (Rome: ISIS- Women's International Information and Communication Service, 1976), 15.
[39] See his many books and articles throughout this study, as his involvement in the Nestle boycott and baby food story remained central, as was his participation in the collective management of bodies in the Third World. Both he and his wife imagined and acted out their perception of necessary world-saving and people-surveillance throughout the globe. See also: Derrick B. Jelliffe and E. F. Patrice Jelliffe, "Feeding Young Infants in Developing Countries: Comments on the Current Situation and Future Needs." Studies in Family Planning 9, no. 8 (August 1, 1978): 227–229; "Human Milk, Nutrition, and the World Resource Crisis," Science 188, no. 4188 (May 9, 1975): 557–561; "Mothers With HIV," BMJ: British Medical Journal 299, no. 6709 (November 11, 1989): 1219; Of course their seminal text on human milk should still be read today: Jelliffe, Human Milk in the Modern World: Psychosocial, Nutritional, and Economic Significance, Oxford Medical Publications, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
[40] Valenze, 3, and x; note the following, also vital for illuminating the history baby food, corporations and public health: "Even the science of nutrition, arguably the most powerful force in its history, needed help from other constituencies (such as insistent mothers and wartime governments) in order to define milk as universally necessary." For wartime governments, motherhood, and saving babies for national health and power, see Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop no. 5 (April 1, 1978): 9–65.
[41] Mike Muller, The Baby Killer, (London: War on Want, 1974), 8.
[42] As discussed in Chapter Three, the phrase comes from an American infant formula executive. I hope this chapter contributes to understandings about imperial capital and an elite global capitalist class. Scholars have begun to reformulate their understanding of American empire, this time penetrating more deeply into political economy in addition to culture and disassembling beliefs about capitalism. This specific focus is the direction current scholarship must pursue, and my chapter on the capitalist vision should contribute to this conversation. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: New York: Verso, 2003); David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: [towards a Theory of Uneven geographical Development] (London: New York: Verso, 2006), The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Neil Smith The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[43] For reading on human rights genealogies and the United Nations, see Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 1998); Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (New York, 1995); and Werner J. Feld, Multinational Corporations and U.N. Politics: The Quest for Codes of Conduct (New York, 1980).
[44] Nitsan Chorev, The World Health Organization between North and South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
[45] World Health Organization, WHO International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (Geneva: WHO, 1981).
[46] World Health Organization, International Code of Marketing of breastmilk Substitutes. The Code is also online at IBFAN's website, http://www.ibfan.org/site2005/Pages/article.php?art_id=52&iui=1 (Accessed March 28, 2012); and Miller, Out of the Mouths of Babes, 79.
[47] Miller, Out of the Mouths of Babes; S. Prakash Sethi, Multinational Corporations and the Impact of Public Advocacy on Corporate Strategy; Infant Formula Action Coalition, now Corporate Accountability International (CAI), http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/cms/page1128.cfm (accessed June 10, 2013); House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade and on Human Rights and International Organizations, Implementation of the World Health Organization Code on Infant Formula Marketing Practices, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., June 16-17, 1981; WHO, International Code of Marketing of breastmilk Substitutes, Geneva, 1981.