Hello and thank you for downloading witness on the BBC World Service with me Claire Bowes.

Today we're going back to July 1977 when American activists began a boycott against the

Swiss-based food company Neslay over the promotion

of powdered milk for babies in developing countries. I've been speaking to the

author of a report titled The Baby Killer, which highlighted the problem of

malnutrition in babies fed on formula milk.

Best milk is best, but when you do not have enough, your baby needs lactogen.

Lactogen was a powdered milk formula for babies.

It came in cans and was mixed with water to create milk. It was first developed by Nestle in

1921 and sold in Europe, but by the 1970s it was also being marketed to mothers in the developing world.

Nestle did make a significant contribution to infant nutrition because you know this was a

form of food that previously hadn't been available and now was available and I think they

felt good about their business. Nestle was the market leader but there were many others

too like Unigate and Bristol Myers promoting powdered milk in developing countries.

And in the early 1970s, concern among doctors and nutritionists in Africa, Asia and Latin America

was growing. They were seeing more and more cases of malnutrition in very young babies, which have been fed on formula milk.

The medics were very clear, and what they were saying is that they were seeing a lot of babies, very ill, very malnourished,

and they linked this to the fact that mothers were trying to bottle feed, very young infants,

under six-month-old infants trying to feed them with

artificial baby milks and they weren't able to do it properly. In 1973 Mike

Mueller, a young journalist, was asked by the British campaigning charity

War on Want to look into the subject. One real concern was that malnutrition had

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