On Making Profits By Trashing Consumer Protections

In any part of the globe, the research is conclusive that the health benefits to babies from breastfeeding exceed those obtainable from infant formula. Moreover, in regions of the world (a) where water is unsanitary (b) where the firewood or other fuel necessary to boil and sterilise the water is either scarce or unaffordable, infant formula can make babies sick, or kill them.

The work demands on mothers to contribute to household incomes can also reduce breastfeeding, or rule it out entirely if employers discourage it or fail to provide the facilities for it. For some of the above reasons, the marketers of infant formula have become adept at portraying their product as a symbol of modernity, and female autonomy.

All of which may explain why the World Health Organisation and many national public health bodies from Europe to Australia are keen to regulate how infant formula can be marketed, and labelled. The aim is to ensure that the health and wellbeing of babies remains the top priority, and not the market opportunities being sought by the infant formula multinationals.

This week, the Luxon government has once again chosen (as it did with Big Tobacco) to put the profits of business ahead of what the public health research is telling us. Under pressure from the giant Danone multinational, New Zealand has backed out of signing a proposed Trans-Tasman labelling standard for infant formula. Danone uses the Aprimil and Karitane brands. In a letter to PM Christopher Luxon, Danone claimed that if the labelling restrictions being proposed by Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) were accepted, Danone would find it harder to sell New Zealand-manufactured exports of infant formula in its Chinese and South East Asian markets, with a potential loss here - in the very worst case scenario - of nearly 450 jobs and $1 billion in export earnings.

The government didn’t need to be threatened twice. Food Minister Andrew Hoggard – who used to be president of Federated Farmers – made his decision to abide by Danone’s wishes sound like it was a free speech issue: “So long as infant formula is safe, and the claims on labels are not misleading, consumers should be allowed to make their own informed choices.” (What a “safe” product is, what would count as “misleading” labelling, and what should qualify as an “informed” choice, were all questions left dangling by Hoggard.) Over the course of the next five years, Hoggard indicated, New Zealand will develop its own labelling standard.

The NZ College of Midwives has expressed its disappointment with the government’s decision to opt out.

"Parents and whānau using infant formula need accurate information about infant feeding. Misleading labelling on infant formula products can result in parents purchasing inappropriate products for their baby or buying more expensive products that make unsubstantiated claims about benefits."

The College also said industry information about products could mislead parents into thinking that common infant feeding challenges can be resolved by using "special" commercial milk formula. The College said parents can make informed choices only when presented with accurate information.

Exactly. And finally:

"The Government has a public health obligation to ensure parents have access to impartial infant and young child feeding information free from commercial influences. Controls on what statements industry make about their products – on the tins, and on digital media, would have represented a commitment on behalf of the Government to infant and child health"

Unfortunately, Labour has chosen to side with the government on this issue. Reportedly (link above) Labour leader Chris Hipkins has said he thought it is a good idea for New Zealand to opt out of the FSANZ standard.

Footnote One: In effect, New Zealand is inviting the industry to self regulate. It hasn’t earned that trust. This recent academic study in the British Medical Journal gives ample reasons as to why mothers and babies need protection against the unsubstantiated claims being made by infant formula companies about the health and nutritional benefits of their products. First, the researchers noted the incidence of the most commonly made claims:

The most common claim types were “helps/supports development of brain and/or eyes and/or nervous system” (323 (53%) products, 13 ingredients), “strengthens/supports a healthy immune system” (239 (39%) products, 12 ingredients), “helps/supports growth and development” (224 (37%) products, 20 ingredients), “easy to digest” (182 (30%) products, 14 ingredients), and “dietary management of allergy including cow’s milk allergy (CMA)” (96 (16%) products, 4 ingredients.)

The supportive evidence for the vast bulk of these claims, the BMJ researchers found, was sketchy at best:

Claims linking long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids to the development of brain, eyes, and nervous system were the most common. This causal link is reported despite recent evidence failing to substantiate the association. Other common claims, such as for prebiotics, probiotics, and synbiotics and for strengthening and supporting a healthy immune system also do not have strong substantiation in the scientific literature. It is worth noting that claims were frequently made in the absence of a link to a specific ingredient. When a link to an ingredient was present, evidence was often inadequate, with many claims not supported by appropriate referencing of published, peer reviewed scientific literature.

How on earth, in these circumstances, can consumers make a genuinely “informed choice” about the health and nutritional claims on the label of their infant formula container? Thanks to the government’s decision to opt out of the FSANZ standard, the welfare of consumers is again being subordinated to the profit-making desires of commercial companies - just as we saw earlier this year, with the scrapping of the anti-smoking measures.

Pesticides, fertilisers etc

For decades, New Zealand has been ranked as the easiest country in the developed world in which to do business. We have remarkably little in the way of red tape and regulation, and the proposal that we need an entirely new Ministry of Regulations to reduce consumer protections even further is absurd, especially coming from an ACT Party that makes such a song and dance about being the enemy of waste and bureaucracy.

ACT’s Ministry of Regulations has now been entrusted with conducting a review of the regulations around the use of agricultural chemicals, pesticides, inhibitors, and fertilisers etc in this country, apparently with a view to speeding up the approval process. 
“Right now, there are too many delays, and the process is too complex,” says ACT leader David Seymour, “ it all takes too long.” Reportedly, the regulatory review is due to be completed by the end of this year.

If as might reasonably be expected, the outcome expands the range of agricultural chemicals while lowering the approval conditions on their use, this can only have negative consequences for public health here, and longer term for our exports offshore where – if anything – increased regulatory restrictions are being put in place, in order to reduce the incidence of chemicals in the food chain. To a marked extent, this global trend is being consumer-driven.

We’re already falling behind. “Currently,” as was pointed out in Farmers Weekly late last year, “the EU’s list of banned chemicals and pesticides comprises 195 items, while NZ’s comparable list of banned substances is 27 items long.” Furthermore:

The regulatory regime in NZ, both current and proposed, appears to lag significantly behind the equivalent systems emerging in the EU. This implies that NZ’s legislators and regulators, along with industry representative bodies in major export-oriented primary and food-producing industries, will need to significantly increase the levels of environmental and social ambition inherent in the policies currently under development in NZ.

“Failure to do so might result in significant reductions in the levels of market access available to NZ exporters, not only in the EU but also in other major markets such as China, the United States and the United Kingdom, as these countries are compelled to increase their own ambition levels in these areas to protect the interests of their domestic producers.

But with the ideologues in the ACT Party cheering from the sidelines, some agricultural-intensive regions of New Zealand are already heading in the opposite direction. In these regions, the existing levels of nitrates in drinking water are already at dangerous levels, thereby raising the risks of bowel cancer and premature births:

Dr Tim Chambers, a researcher studying the health impacts of nitrates, said evidence showed the drinking water standard for nitrate of 11.3mg/L ought to be lowered. "The magnitude of the drop would probably, based on current evidence, be about half. The studies that we've been seeing around maternal outcomes like pre-term birth, those associations are starting to be seen around 5mg/L," he said.

So basically, we need more regulation of these chemicals, down to permissible levels of less than half what current farming practice is delivering. That’s not happening. Once again, the welfare of mothers, babies and the public at large is being jeopardised by the pursuit of farming profits, with politicians serving as dutiful accomplices.

Nerds Who Rule

When Vampire Weekend released its debut album in 2008, one critic called them the “whitest band in the world.” Ezra Koenig and his talented pals have managed to make a virtue out of sounding like privileged trust fund kids nerdily self-aware of their cultural appropriations. (Koenig’s earlier musical projects had included an experimental band called The Sophisticuffs, and a faux hip hop group called L’Homme Run.)

In similarly drollish/trollish vein from that debut album, here was Koenig in a dog-festooned sweater, fronting the band’s Congolese soukous guitar influences on “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”... in order to chart a young woman’s hellbent progress from Louis Vuitton bags with her Mom to sophomore years with reggaeton, under the unnatural guidance of Peter Gabriel...

Flash forward to mid 2024 and Koenig was recently on the Daily Show, doing a terrific rendition of “Mary Boone” off the band’s new album. The real life Mary Boone is an influential Manhattan art dealer. Koenig is name-checking Boone here as the gatekeeper of artistic validation and romantic possibility… as filtered through the memories of a mid-career artist looking back at his early 1990s arrival in New York City.

In case anyone thinks the song might be autobiographical, Koenig makes it crystal clear that it isn’t. The guy in the song is “from Jersey/not from Brooklyn” with Brooklyn being the place where Koenig himself grew up. The drum sample from Soul II Soul’s early 90s epic “Back To Life” anchors the arrangement beautifully in its cultural time and place...

Oh my love, was it all in vain

We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same

In a quiet moment at the theatre, I could hear the train

Deep inside the city, your memory remains

Mary Boone, Mary Boone..
I’m on the dark side of your room

On this rendition of “Mary Boone” at least, what keeps sentimentality at bay is the old, inescapable self-awareness. Koenig has always seemed to me to be like one of those prescient characters from the movie Metropolitan brought to life. At heart, he’s probably a Fourierist:

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