In the wake of the massive lead crisis that left the city of Flint without drinkable water, Michigan is once again facing a ballooning controversy over how it manages its public waters. This time around, the controversy centers on how the world’s biggest food company is seeking to suck out more spring water from Osceola Township’s White Pines Spring. Nestlé, a corporation that’s been involved in more than its fair share of scandals and has faced accusations of misconduct, is profiting from an admittedly sweet deal in which it pumps out water for free and sells it throughout the Midwest under the Ice Mountain brand name. The company already pumps about 250 gallons per minute and wants to ramp up to 400 gallons per minute, for a whopping 210 million gallons every year.
Not surprisingly, the company’s application to sell public goods for private profit has faced massive opposition since it came out. While Nestlé has claimed that its extractions would have no significant impact on stream flow or wetland habitats, the local Sierra Club and other groups have countered that it’s impossible to trust their self-reporting on a resource that takes years to accurately study.
The activists have every reason to distrust Nestlé, a company that’s been involved in a range of scandals over the past decades that stretches far beyond what you’d expect for even a firm of that size. In addition to the Michigan controversy, Nestlé has also been the target of criticism for pumping millions of gallons of public water out of California for profit, even as residents have been ordered to cut their own usage in the midst of the state’s ongoing drought. And its behavior in developing countries, where there is even less government oversight and regulation, has caused even greater damage. More than 40 years after NGOs such as the The International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) first pulled the lid off the company’s unethical marketing practices, it looks like it’s time for a new round of action.
Even in the past couple of years, the corporation has left a considerable number of misdeeds in its wake. In September 2015, a report from the Fair Labor Association found that children younger than 15 were working at cocoa farms in Ivory Coast that had links to the Nestlé empire. At one farm, investigators found that a worker had never been paid for a year’s worth of labor. While the company gets a nod for commissioning the report, it came more than a decade after Nestlé promised to end the use of child labor in its supply chains, raising the question of why the issue has continued unresolved. Only two months after that report came out, Nestlé admitted that a series of labor abuses, including coercion, human trafficking, and even slavery, had been discovered in their seafood supply chain in Thailand, which the company uses for its Fancy Feast cat food brand. The company was sued over these findings, but there is still a fair amount of murkiness surrounding its vast network of suppliers, especially in Southeast Asia.
Another ongoing Nestlé scandal that simply won’t fade away centers on the company’s questionable tactics to market infant formula. Decades after the WHO enacted the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981, international watchdogs, such as the IBFAN, say the company has continued to use unethical methods in Africa, Latin America, and Asia to promote infant formula to poor families. Some of these tactics include distributing free samples that interfered with lactation, forcing mothers to buy formula instead of breastfeeding. Nestlé has also encouraged families in developing countries to use milk powder that needs to be mixed with sterilized water – a directive that’s often impossible to fulfill in developing countries due to low literacy rates and unclean water supplies. This means that babies have a much higher risk of being exposed to potentially fatal diseases like cholera.
The most recent round of allegations concerns misconduct by Nestlé employees in China. According to a massive investigation by Reuters, the company’s staff were accused of cozying up to doctors, greasing their palms in order to get them to recommend the company’s formula, flagrantly ignoring a 1995 regulation stipulating that doctors must remain impartial in recommending products to families of infants under six months old. Nestlé’s aggressive marketing tactics have even extended to the realm of private medical data. This summer, six of the company’s employees were charged with bribing doctors and medical staff to obtain patients’ personal information as a way to improve their marketing strategy.
Although the firm has been targeted with a range of lawsuits over these kinds of issues, they’ve had a spotty history, with some failing due to technicalities. In the case of Nestlé’s facilitation of child labor and other abuses in West Africa, the judge dismissed the charges this March, blaming lack of jurisdiction over a foreign complaint involving foreign allegations. But there are other ways to combine the power of boycotts with legal and political action to hit Nestlé where it hurts. For instance, under the vast jurisdiction of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the government can sue any company with US-based branches or bank accounts for bribing foreign officials – charges that could well apply to Nestlé’s misdeeds in China. While there’s been a dry spell in FCPA enforcement since Trump took office, at the very least, the attorney general has called efforts to enforce the law “critical.” It’s a promising sign, since when it comes to tackling corporate misbehavior on such a grand scale, a multi-pronged approach is the only way to get results.