Nestle Speakers Disagree Over Facts

A spokesman for the Boston Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) and a representative of the Nestle Corporation disagreed over the facts of the distribution of Nestle's infant formula last night at a debate in Emerson Hall.

Steven Wirtz, an INFACT spokesman, said students should boycott Nestle products because Nestle continues to promote its infant formula and distribute free samples to poor mothers in rural areas of Third World countries.

Rudy Bechtal, product manager for Nestle and recent graduate of the Business School, said Nestle has ceased all advertising of the formula and gives out samples only upon the request of governments or medical officials.

"Many people believe we're running an Avon-lady type of operation--this isn't so," Bechtal said.

Power Failure

"When a company in Geneva says, 'We've stopped free samples,' what do they know about what's going on in the countries where they sell their product?" Wirtz asked.

He added that whenever opponents of Nestle traveled to Third World nations they found stocks of the infant formula in rural pharmacies, as well as advertisements.

Bechtal said relief organizations and churches distribute the formula in rural areas.

Wirtz said the formula is too expensive and too vulnerable to contamination from bacteria-infested water supplies to benefit the Third World's poor.

He said the Nestle Corporation primarily seeks profits, not health of infants.

"The infant formula product is marginally profitable, not a big money-maker," Bechtal said.

"We're selling it in urban areas to working upper-and middle-income mothers--in rural areas it's the relief agencies and churches that are supplying it," he added.

Bechtal said Nestle had agreed to accept the recommendations of a World Health Organization (WHO) conference on infant nutrition planned for October.

"WHO has no enforcing powers," Wirtz said. He said Nestle had agreed to the proposals of four previous WHO conferences yet continued advertising and distribution of free samples.

Gretchen G. Berggren, assistant professor of population sciences in the Faculty of Public Health, moderated the debate, sponsored by the Harvard Hunger Action Project.

She said scientists need to perform much more research on such questions as the quantity and quality of breast milk in malnourished mothers, different weaning times in different societies, and the emotional bonding between mother and child induced by breast-feeding