Publications
Partners
Baby formula companies have been accused of outlining exploitative marketing playbooks to sell their products, including taking advantage of parents’ worries about their children’s health and development.
This is according to the findings of the 2023 Lancet Series on breastfeeding, which comprises three papers that were launched in South Africa on Friday.
READ: Gauteng health department urges mothers to breastfeed their babies
The series interrogates baby formula companies’ exploitative marketing playbook and the commercial formula lobby.
Professor Linda Richter in the Department of Science and Innovation, National Research Foundation Centre of Excellence for Human Development at Wits University and co-author on papers 1 and 2 series said the formula milk industry used poor science to suggest, with little supporting evidence, that their products were solutions to common infant health and developmental challenges.
She said the marketing techniques violated the 1981 World Health Organisation's International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, to which countries agreed labels should not idealise the use of formula, nor exploit poor science to create an untrue story to sell more products.
The series describes how profits made by the formula milk industry benefit companies in high-income countries while the social, economic and environmental harms are widely distributed in low- and middle-income countries, such as South Africa.
Lancet issue commentary co-author Dr Chantell Witten at the University of the Western Cape said creating an enabling environment for mothers to optimally breastfeed their babies needs a whole-of-society approach, with stronger monitoring and enforcement of our regulations to control the marketing of formula milk for children.
READ: Mothers encouraged to breast-feed during Covid-19
According to the authors, women also face a lack of breastfeeding promotion, protection and support within healthcare systems due to limited public budgets, adequate training of and skilled support by health workers, influence from the milk formula industry, including the distribution of samples, and an absence of care that is culturally appropriate and led by the needs of women.
They argued that breastfeeding outcomes improve when health systems actively empower women and enable experienced peers to support women during pregnancy, childbirth and onwards.
The report read:
The series authors stressed that breastfeeding was a collective responsibility of society and called for more effective promotion, support and protection for breastfeeding, including a much better-trained healthcare workforce and an international legal treaty to end exploitative formula milk marketing and prohibit political lobbying.
They called for government and workplaces to recognise the value of breastfeeding and care work, through actions such as extending the duration of paid maternity leave to align with the six-month WHO recommended duration of exclusive breastfeeding.
