Baby formula marketing practices are still too aggressive

by  Melissa Chan

June 23, 2022
Co-published with Foreign Policy

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

An investigation in the 1970s into the dubious marketing tactics of companies selling baby milk formula led to a global commitment to change.

But decades later, those companies continue to use the same aggressive marketing tactics in countries with less resources to enforce regulations.

Globally, experts warn that these companies have long employed predatory marketing in order to maximize the purchase of formula at the expense of breastfeeding.

(Photo Illustration by d3sign/Getty Images)

The same week in February that Abbott, one of the top producers of baby formula in the United States, began a series of recalls that triggered a national shortage, the World Health Organization (WHO) released an important but little-noticed report. The researchers cataloged another problem with baby formula: There’s an overreliance on it in much of the world, and that’s the result of aggressive and misleading marketing by the companies producing it.

“Formula milk marketing knows no limits. It misuses and distorts information to influence decisions and practices,” the authors wrote. The report researched formula marketing practices in eight countries around the world but was largely overshadowed by news in the United States.

The current shortage of formula in the United States underscores the need for substitute milk and there are circumstances when formula is indispensable, especially for working parents, parents with premature babies, or parents who are struggling to lactate. The need is so essential that the Biden administration announced earlier this month that it would import 44,000 pounds of Nestlé infant formula from Switzerland to distribute throughout the United States.

But the global health consensus is that breastmilk, whenever possible, is always better for infant health than commercial products. The benefits of breastfeeding have been well-documented: It improves immune systems to better protect babies against infections, and it reduces mothers’ risks of diabetes and even cancer. In wealthy countries, robust public health campaigns together with tighter scrutiny on corporate advertising mean mothers face better chances at making informed decisions about when to use milk formula.

Formula milk companies in Vietnam, meanwhile, deploy some of the most aggressive marketing strategies in the world, according to the WHO. Women are bombarded with television commercials and social media posts, often distorting science to legitimize claims and sell their products. Representatives of these companies, known as “promotional girls,” even stroll the halls of hospitals to befriend new and unsuspecting mothers.

The marketing is effective. About 76 percent of babies in Vietnam are fed formula, either partially or completely. The United Nations has set a target to bring that number down globally to 50 percent by 2025 — a goal the world will likely miss.

“It’s in rapidly advancing economies like Vietnam where they put a lot of energy,” says Dr. Laurence Grummer-Strawn, a nutrition expert at the WHO. “They know that there’s going to be a growth in the market there. People’s incomes are rising, women are getting more and more active in the workforce, and so they do a lot of marketing.”

About one-third of all new mothers in Vietnam say they’ve been given samples, higher than any other country surveyed by the WHO except China. But the problem is global. The WHO research team also found such aggressive marketing tactics in Bangladesh, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and elsewhere. In one of the most outrageous cases, the WHO documented healthcare workers in Mexico whisking infants away from lactating mothers and unnecessarily introducing day-old newborns to formula.

These strategies persist despite the International Code of Marketing and Breast-milk Substitutes, a framework on best practices similar to the global tobacco agreement. The two products are in fact the only items for which worldwide recommendations on marketing exist. The non-binding nature of the Code, however, has meant that companies continue to put profits over people, particularly in countries where public health infrastructure and enforcement mechanisms are weaker.

The WHO adopted the framework in 1981 after the London-based nonprofit War on Want published a seminal report entitled, “The Baby Killer.” The report investigated the aggressive and inaccurate marketing tactics of multinational baby milk formula companies at the time. Researchers accused Nestlé and Abbott — still major players in the market today — of peddling formula to mothers who could not afford them and would have been better off breastfeeding. From Jamaica to Jordan, they documented how early adoption of milk formula led to higher rates of infection and, in the most extreme cases, malnutrition, as low-income mothers sought to extend costly formula by diluting the solution. The report shocked the public and moved the world to action.

Today, though, the WHO says that globally only 44 percent of babies under six months are exclusively breastfed. Meanwhile, formula has ballooned to a $55 billion industry. Those profits in part reflect the growing number of women worldwide who are joining the workforce and opting for formula because they have fewer opportunities to breastfeed their babies. But it is also the result of pushy marketing practices in countries where local health infrastructure is weak and lactation counseling services are unable to keep up. From China to Nigeria, new mothers contend with a panoply of information touting formula milk over breastfeeding.

The internet provides these companies with a powerful and easy tool they did not have decades ago. Digital marketing is cheap, and through social media influencers, Facebook parenting groups, and Google search ads, breastmilk substitute companies push their products — and their questionable health claims — through means that are not easily recognizable as advertising.

To Huong, 35, who lives in Vietnam, saw firsthand the marketing tactics of formula milk companies when she gave birth via C-section to her first child seven years ago. She believed — from friends, family members, and the mess of information she found clicking around the internet — that women who had C-sections could not breastfeed.

“I wasn’t confident,” she said. “And then after my delivery, I did not have breastmilk readily. So I went with formula.” She didn’t know at the time that with some help from a counselor, it was likely she could have breastfed her child.

Selecting which brand of formula to buy proved as stressful as her decision to use it at all. She said she was “overwhelmed by different ads,” which promised everything from infant digestive health to reduced crying.

Alive & Thrive, a global maternal and infant health organization, worked with a technical team last year to examine the Vietnamese market. Scraping more than 16,000 online posts, from social media content to e-commerce websites, they found more than 4,000 violations of the Code, with Japan’s GuunUp MBP the leading culprit in the country — 80 percent of its posts failed to meet Code standards. Other multinationals, from US-based Mead Johnson to Switzerland’s Nestlé, were also caught employing questionable marketing tactics.

In one example, Alive & Thrive researchers found Mead Johnson providing discounts for its Enfagrow brand of infant formula — a violation of the Code to market products for children under 24 months old. In the advertisement, the company used a photo of their product meant for toddlers as a means of staying compliant. Alive & Thrive also found that Nestlé, through its Facebook page in Vietnam, sought to contact parents directly — another Code violation.

Manufacturers have even capitalized on parental fears around Covid-19, pivoting their marketing to focus on vague claims their products improve immunity. According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, one Vietnamese brand used a photo of WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on a Facebook post about the pandemic, suggesting by proximity that its formula might combat the virus.

In response to requests for comment, Nestlé Vietnam did not response to specific allegations but issued a statement saying the company responsibly markets breastmilk substitutes and that it has “a strict policy and robust compliance and governance system in place to hold our actions to account.” The other companies mentioned in this story did not respond to requests for comment.

Vietnam passed legislation in accordance with the Code a few years ago, meaning the government can take action against those who break advertising rules. But Vu Hoang Duong, a regional technical specialist at Alive & Thrive, said there “are too few to scan all the violations on digital platforms.” The Ministry of Health has just three inspectors in charge of Code enforcement. The ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

As a result, the work of countering pseudo-science and the confusing barrage of advertising often falls on mothers committed to promoting the benefits of breastfeeding over milk substitutes. To Huong, who regrets feeding her child formula, has a message for women in Vietnam: “Thoroughly research the origin and ingredients in formula milk before giving it to your baby. And if you’re having trouble, seek help from a breastmilk counselor!”

Vo Kieu Bao Uyen contributed reporting.

Dear Mainstream Media: Please Retire the Word “Conservative”

BY MICHAEL DOVERFacebook

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Leave politics aside for a moment, if you can. What does the word “conservative” mean to you, outside of that cursed arena? To me, it connotes respecting tradition, caution when it comes to change, and hewing to the tried and true. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions; marked by moderation or caution; and marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners.”

Returning to the political realm, does any of that apply to so-called conservatives today?

When Mitch McConnell refused even to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the specious grounds that it couldn’t be considered in a presidential election year, what manner of existing views, conditions or institutions was he maintaining?

And when he upended that supposed rule to rush Amy Coney Barrett through the confirmation process just weeks before the 2020 elections (when early voting was already underway), how did that show moderation or caution?

When candidate Donald Trump mocked a disabled journalist and trashed the parents of an American soldier killed in action, what traditional norms of taste or manners was he upholding?

Once in office, when he lied again and again about almost anything, what principle of honest government was he serving?

And when he knowingly and repeatedly lied that the 2020 election was stolen, and plotted to overthrow the results, how does that in any way conform to any reasonable concept of conservatism?

Fox TV’s Tucker Carlson is often described as a “conservative commentator.” How so? In what way does he respect tradition, caution or moderation?

When he praises — “idolizes” is probably a better word — Hungarian autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán, what part of his tenure does he most appreciate: curtailing press freedom, moving to restrict or eliminate LGBTQ rights, or embracing “Christian democracy”?

As if following Carlson’s playbook, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held in Budapest this year. Speakers included Trump and Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff. Another speaker was described in The Guardian newspaper as a “notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews ‘stinking excrement,’ referred to Roma as ‘animals’ and used racial epithets to describe Black people.” This is “conservative”?

And what is conservative about the members of Congress who have tried to portray the January 6 mob as a bunch of “tourists” quietly visiting the Capitol, or those at the podium that day urging the crowd to “fight like hell,” or Senate Republicans refusing to approve an investigation into that day’s deadly violence?

Words matter. Calling McConnell or Carlson or a January 6 rioter conservative is to normalize their behavior. “Conservative” is such a comforting word; it connotes thoughtful consideration, reasoned debate, consideration of others’ viewpoints. It suggests adherence to the law, not gaming the system or trying to overturn an election based on lies. It allows the reader or hearer to relax: These are not crazy people, they’re just conservatives and patriots.

When McConnell said when he took over as Senate majority leader that his first job was to ensure that President Obama was a one-term president, that was not a conservative statement. It was an extremist saying he had no interest in governing despite the fact that he was leading a government institution. When Missouri Senator Josh Hawley raised a fist in salute to the January 6 insurrectionists, that was not a conservative act. It was a direct violation of his oath of office.

There are other words the mainstream media can use for these people. My favorite happens to be “extremist.” It’s short and businesslike. It doesn’t need any explanation; it nicely stands on its own. It could be modified, if desired, as in “right-wing extremist” or “anti-democracy extremist,” though that’s probably not necessary.

Some members of this crowd can of course be further identified as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists and other such categories. I hope the wordsmiths in the media can and will find many other terms that both clarify and elaborate on “extremist” or “extremism.”

What’s essential is to give the extremists no quarter, no place to hide behind comforting, compromising, euphemistic — and deceptive — words like “conservative.”

Michael Dover (mdover@leverettnet.net) is a co-founder of Swing Left Western Massachusetts.

Mining Resistance From Alberta to Argentina

BY ENNEDITH LOPEZFacebook

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At the end of last year, at the height of the Omicron variant spread, an important battle was being fought for clean water and a healthy environment, the value of which has only become clearer during the last couple of years.

At one of the many frontiers of mineral extraction in the Patagonian province of Chubut, Argentina, Indigenous Mapuche-Tehuelche communities and citizens groups flooded the streets for days just before Christmas 2021.

A U.S.-Canadian mining company, Pan American Silver, had been pressuring legislators there to overturn a nearly 20-year prohibition on open-pit metal mining and the use of cyanide in mineral processing, which threatens precious water supplies. When lawmakers obliged and zoned for mining where the company wants to operate on the province’s plateau, people went to the streets by the thousands and faced violent police repression.

But the people prevailed, and within a few days succeeded in getting the zoning law overturned.

This is just one example of the important frontline struggles that have fought hard to keep organizing during the pandemic despite the difficult conditions. This story and others are collected in a new report: No Reprieve for Life and Territory: COVID-19 and Resistance to the Mining Pandemic.

No Reprieve looks at how governments and mining companies took advantage of social constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic to increase their profits and declare mining “essential” for economic recovery and the energy transition.

This report focuses on case studies in nine Latin American countries: Mexico, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. It was developed by the Coalition Against the Mining Pandemic-Latin America, part of a global network of environmental justice groups. 

In nearly every case studied, Indigenous peoples and other mining affected communities faced intensified repression, criminalization, targeted violence, and militarization in response to their efforts to protect water and land from the long-term impacts of mining.

A Global Trend of Repression by Mining Companies

In the U.S., we are familiar with the criminalization and repression of movements for environmental justice, racial justice, and Indigenous rights at the behest of extractive industries.

Indigenous people fighting to defend and protect their land have been met with serious repression and legal persecution in the United States, including during the Enbridge Line 3, Line 5, and Standing Rock protests. The intense policing and militarization of movements has been accelerated by so-called “Critical Infrastructure Laws,” enforced by state governments. These laws conflate peaceful protest with acts of domestic terrorism and have been a key tool pushed for by the fossil fuel industry to expand oil and gas pipeline projects.

This echoes a global trend.

For years now international organizations documented industry pressure to contain resistance through repression and violence. “Activists in the global north are facing increased criminalization,” Adrien Salazar of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance told CNN last year. Meanwhile, “environmental defenders in the global south are facing increasing risk of death.”

In 2021 alone, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights found that 147 human rights activists had been murdered. In the first four months of 2022, 89 more had been murdered already.

A majority of the slain activists were land defenders, environmental activists, or Indigenous community members. According to the Human Rights Defenders and Civic Freedoms Programme, 36 percent of attacks on human rights defenders that the center has documented relate to the extractive sector.

This kind of repression ultimately costs people their health, lives, and well-being. At the same time, it undermines democratic systems and jeopardizes our environment.

Mining Companies Are Peddling False Solutions

During the pandemic, extractive industries have criminalized and threatened defenders or pressed their case for more repression by presenting themselves as important for economic recovery.

Despite the threats that metal mining poses to the land and water, No Reprieve documents how this industry repositioned itself as “essential” while benefiting from a rise in gold, silver, and copper market prices, leading some mining companies to make record-breaking profits.

Beyond Argentina, this trend was clearly demonstrated elsewhere in Latin America through policy changes that made mining permitting easier, relaxed environmental oversight, and provided tax breaks. A few countries, such as Panama and Ecuador, decreed special plans to make mining a central focus for economic reactivation.

Unlike in the United States, where repression often benefits fossil fuel industries foremost, Latin America has seen a rise in violent extractivism by companies arguing that the minerals they mine are necessary for renewable energy technology.

Globally, the installation of renewable energy infrastructure and the manufacture of electric vehicles is projected to increase demand for certain minerals and metals, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. This led to initiatives in countries such as Peru and Mexico making lithium extraction a strategic priority for the state.

These challenges point to the need for a just transition to renewable energy that doesn’t repeat the same abuses of the extractive industry. Whatever the mineral or metal, frontline and Indigenous communities still bear the brunt of harms from mineral extraction that are rarely addressed and which has given rise to broad resistance.

State favoritism toward the mining industry during the pandemic even led to the perception that it was a crisis made to suit the mining industry.

Iván Paillalaf, a member of the Mapuche-Tehuelche community of Laguna Fría Chacay Oeste in Chubut, believes “the crisis that currently exists in Chubut… is an intentionally designed crisis; a crisis that has been created precisely to try and impose this activity so that the people see no other way out other than mining.”

This does not mean that communities have viewed the pandemic itself as a conspiracy, but rather that they’ve seen how corporations and governments are taking advantage of the social and economic constraints that it created. This reaffirmed for them the urgent need to continue defending their communities and territories under these difficult conditions.

Heroic Resistance Across the Hemisphere

Even with these obstacles, these Latin American communities offer an inspiring example of resistance against difficult odds. Resistance remains strong in Chubut and across the hemisphere.

Despite the stay-at-home orders that hindered organizing efforts, a People’s Initiative to expand the prohibition on open pit mining in Chubut to include exploration and prospecting activities collected double the signatures required by law to be considered. This initiative was rejected without debate in 2021 before the legislature tried to overturn the existing ban. But the movement in Argentina is taking another run at it this year, aiming to collect 100,000 signatures.

North and South, repression and violence is taking place against those standing up to extractive industries. This is part of the extractive capitalist model that permits private corporate interests to overpower human rights, self-determination, and democracy..

The cases detailed in No Reprieve demonstrate a need to envision a future beyond the extractivist economy. During a pandemic and in the face of a climate crisis, the struggle to defend our territories and collective health is more essential now than ever.

This first appeared on FPIF.

Ennedith Lopez is a New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Climate Chaos Arrives in Yellowstone

BY PHIL KNIGHT]FacebookTwitter

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Northern loop road collapse, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Yellowstone National Park.

Somewhere in Yellowstone’s wild green valleys the wildlife is having a massive party. Bison are cavorting and rolling in the dust, pronghorn and mule deer are having races, coyotes are yipping up a storm, wolves are howling and wrestling and playing, bears are romping about, having tree climbing contests. Even the dour moose are nodding and kicking up their heels and badgers are digging and wriggling about. Cranes call their ancient rattles, ground squirrels run across empty highways, and fish explore remade river channels free of hooks and lines.

On Monday,  June 13 Yellowstone and southern Montana experienced its worst natural disaster in modern times, with the possible exception of the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake. Following a dry and mild winter, unusually heavy late spring snowfall (6 feet over Memorial Day Weekend) in the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains north and east of Yellowstone left the landscape primed for a massive flood. And over the weekend of June 11 and 12 the skies delivered a killer punch in the form of torrential rain – an entire summer’s worth in 3 days. And atmospheric river aimed at Yellowstone like a warm water hose, dousing the wet spring snow pack with a vertical flood of rain. This heavy rain on the deep snow brought 8 inches of water out of the mountains in a hurry, swelling rivers and creeks to unheard of ferocity, altering the course of many rivers and demolishing everything in the way.

Yellowstone is well known and infamous for being one of the biggest and most powerful volcanoes on Earth. Fears of a mega eruption here are genuine but low on the scale of likely disasters. But not many predicted the events of Monday the 13^th of June.

Every creek and river coming out of the high country burst its banks, with catastrophic results. Roads were torn apart, bridges destroyed, communities heavily flooded with cold brown rushing water. The normally inviting blue-green Yellowstone River rose to over three feet beyond its record high level, reaching 50,000 cubic feet per second at Corwin Springs just north of the Park, where  the previous record was 32,000. Within hours it undercut riverbanks until homes fell into the river and were swept downstream. The Yellowstone in Yankee Jim Canyon rose 50 feet in a few hours, covering State Highway 89 and ripping down the old one-lane Carbella Bridge. The river, now an insane raging beast, inundated lower lying parts of Paradise Valley and the town of Livingston, requiring the hospital there to be evacuated. Only sandbagging on top of the levee – built following 2 consecutive years of “100-year” floods in 1996 and 1997 – kept the flooding in Livingston from being much worse.

The tourist town of Gardiner Montana was completely cut off as roads all around the town were flooded and destroyed. The town water system was polluted and the power went out. Red Lodge Montana, a popular tourist town on the Beartooth Highway, was devastated when  Rock Creek raged through the middle of town, covering roads in deep rushing water, flooding hundreds of home and businesses and tearing houses off their foundations. The main street in town was left covered with huge boulders and trees and bridges were gone. Cooke City and Silver Gate Montana, near Yellowstone’s Northeast Entrance, were also cut off and lost all their bridges. The Beartooth Highway, called by some “the most scenic road in America”, has at least 6 major washouts and is closed indefinitely. Currently the only way to reach Cooke City is from Cody, Wyoming over the Chief Joseph Highway.

Many other Montana towns and settlements throughout the region suffered massive damage, from Belfry to Absarokee to Roscoe and Nye. The road to the popular East Rosebud Lake was totally destroyed as was a section of road to the Stillwater Mine. In Billings, the state’s largest city, the water treatment plant had to be temporarily shut down.

The one amazing silver lining is that no one was hurt or killed in these floods. Search and Rescue folks deserve a huge amount of credit. Swift water rescues, helicopter recues and rapid contact and evacuation of park visitors made sure everyone was safe.

As I write this Yellowstone Park is completely closed and all tourists – 10,000 or so – have been evacuated. The road into the park from the North Entrance is beyond repair. The raging Gardiner River reduced this important road to rubble, also trashing the sewage system for Mammoth Hot Springs. It is the only road in from the North Entrance to Mammoth Hot Springs, the park headquarters, and is typically very busy. This five mile road is so badly damaged it will probably have to be replaced elsewhere, and in fact $50 million in federal highway money has just been promised to do that.  The road was washed away and compromised between Tower Junction and the Northeast Entrance, meaning Yellowstone’s wildlife-rich Lamar Valley, epicenter of a thriving wildlife tourism industry, is inaccessible.

It is, for now, a whole different world in Lamar Valley, where the usual summer throngs of tourists seeking the next wildlife photo op, crowding every turnout, pushing closer and closer toward sensitive and dangerous animals, are missing. You can be sure that Yellowstone’s diverse and spectacular wildlife do not miss the crowds nor the traffic – they have the summer valleys to themselves for the first time in memory. How I would love to see how the animals react to this absence of annoying bipeds our infernal machines.

Other parts of Yellowstone fared better and the southern loop road to Yellowstone Lake, Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Norris Geyser Basin will open June 22. The Northern Loop could open in early July. Vehicles will be able to enter the South, West and East entrances to the park. But the park will have a limited entry system based on vehicle license plate, to avoid completely overwhelming the remaining accessible sites.

Ongoing infrastructure projects in Yellowstone like replacing a bridge over the Yellowstone River near Tower and improving the Craig Pass road will likely be deferred or delayed as crews and resources are diverted to try and make roads passable.

The backcountry of Yellowstone is also currently closed, as is much of the nearby Custer Gallatin National Forest, including the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains, leaving vast areas of wilderness essentially free of humans in summer – an unheard-of prospect and a great relief to wildlife. Backcountry infrastructure like bridges, trails, campsites and trailheads – not to mention access roads – is no doubt in bad shape and will take months to assess and years to repair. And then what? When will the next, possibly worse, extreme flood occur?

Many of us living in the Yellowstone region recall the 1988 forest fires that burned over nearly 1/3 of Yellowstone Park and many surrounding areas. The fires of that season were immense, destructive and terrifying. Yet they did not damage nearly as much infrastructure as the 2022 floods. Those fires were probably fueled by climate change and should have been  a major alarm. Humans however seem to keep hitting the snooze button after wake-up calls from nature. This time will be no different – we will clean up and repair and continue with business as usual, burning lots of fossil fuel to fix what nature tried to reclaim and declaring (as Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, on holiday in Italy during the floods and unwilling to cut short his trip to deal with a massive disaster, said) “Montana is open for business.”

Accelerating climate change, fueled entirely by human consumption of coal, oil and natural gas, is producing ever more disastrous events like the Yellowstone floods. The 2021 Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment predicted a “30-80% increase in spring precipitation” in Greater Yellowstone. Looks like that came true all at once. And the results are terrifying.

The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere was 3.3 million years ago. At that time, there was no ice at the Earth’s poles!  We are in uncharted territory, burning through options as we delay and deny, politicians posturing and pretending as they slurp subsidies from the barons of oil, failing to take meaningful action to shore up the future from the coming chaos of runaway Greenhouse Effect.

Yellowstone is hardly the only place getting hammered by climate chaos. The American Southwest is baking in 110 degrees and no rain, with dust storms becoming the norm.  The Colorado River is drying Up.  Lake Powell is at 27% of capacity and Lake Meade at 28%. These reservoirs are the life blood of major cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas.  The Great Salt Lake is at a record low level and is at a tipping point where 1% more salinity could kill all the brine shrimp and sterilize the lake, a major stopover for migrating birds. Dust storms from the dry lake bed will bring toxic dust into Salt Lake City and the heavily populated Wasatch Front. Fires of course are breaking out everywhere with entire towns getting incinerated in Colorado, California, Oregon Washing ton and Montana the past year. Alaska is burning heavily already with tundra fires burning vast areas of the North Slope, and sea ice becoming a thing of the past. Fires are raging in New Mexico and Arizona. In the Southeastern US a record breaking heat wave is descending right now which will bring the heat index into uncharted territory in major cities like Atlanta and Charlotte and Nashville. India has just been through a massive killer heat wave, and Europe is baking in one of the worst heat waves ever seen there – temps nearing 40 degrees C (103 F) in France, and Spain is similarly hot – 10 degrees C above normal. Heat waves are the most deadly phenomenon of climate change – a 2003 heat wave in Europe killed 15,000 people.

We seem to assume things will stay as they are, that each catastrophe is a one-off and will not happen again nor will we be faced with a worse one. The Yellowstone floods have brought home how bad it can get and how quickly. Waters rose within minutes in many places, taking people by surprise and inundating areas viewed as above flood zones. Now we have a massive mess to clean up, an immense amount of repairs to do, and a large unemployed work force of guides (myself included), Park Service folks, restaurant and hotel employees, raft guides, bus drivers, etc. right at the start of what is usually the busiest season for the national parks. Add this massive layoff to the cost of repairs and the huge loss of tourism dollars. Catastrophes like the Yellowstone floods are extremely expensive and should be added to the cost/benefit analysis of development of existing and new fossil fuel sources.

The irony is not lost on me that my job and the tourism industry are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. On a typical day on the job as a Yellowstone tour guide I was driving about 240 miles with some days up to 400. So I realize I was contributing to the eventual demise of the place I love and work. Industrial tourism is one of many arms of the fossil fuel beast, burning up petrified swamps and dinosaur bones in a mad frenzy to do and see and consume the beauty and mystery of the vanishing natural world before it is gone. Eco-tourism as such does not really exist unless it is birding in your own back yard or walking local trails.

Thanks to a serious injury that sidelined my guiding career in May this year I have burned very little fossil fuel in the past 2 months. With oil corporations profiteering off the Ukraine war and gas around $5.00 per gallon, being sidelined is a bit of a relief and is saving my wife and I some serious money on gas (which is instead going to medical bills). Tour companies in Yellowstone and everywhere are raising rates as a necessity with fuel prices skyrocketing. The Covid 19 pandemic had already put a serious dent in tourism during the last 2 years  – I was out of work for 2 months in the spring of 2020. Yellowstone area tourism had rebounded quite a bit and was on track to be back to near record numbers – 4.5 million visitors per year. Now it’s all a big question how much the park can handle and how many people will still visit. And where will all those displaced visitors go? Other parks like Glacier and Grand Teton are guaranteed to get swamped with visitors.

Of course the federal government and state and local tourism promoters are hell bent on getting everything open as soon as possible. Most of Yellowstone will be up and running by early July, but the north and Northeast entrance roads are too heavily damaged and will require major work. Still, with Yellowstone such a major tourist draw all stops will be pulled out to get it back open, impacts and expense be damned.

Perhaps this would be a good time to take a pause and consider what we are doing. How should we approach preservation of iconic and imperiled landscapes like Yellowstone, part of the “last great intact temperate ecosystem”?  Is heavy duty tourism really the best way to interact with such places as Yellowstone Lake, Hayden Valley, Lamar Valley? Is unfettered tourism even sustainable? Are we killing the goose that laid the golden egg?

The Yellowstone floods may be a one-off or they may return this season or next spring. You can expect more of the same – or worse – in Yellowstone or any number of other locations. For instance, in Denali National Park in Alaska a big chunk of the only road into the park interior slid off a mountain recently (probably due to permafrost melting), and will require major repairs to access the campgrounds and resorts at Wonder Lake and Kantishna.

Anyone care to predict the next mega disaster caused by fossil fueled fools?

Phil Knight is an environmental activist in Bozeman, Montana. He is a board member of the Gallatin-Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance.

Singapore’s proposed online safety laws look like more censorship in disguise

If the government appoints itself Guardian of the Internet, its citizens will never learn how to navigate a messy online world.


By KIRSTEN HAN
29 JUNE 2022

Ore Huiying/Bloomberg/Getty Images

IDEAS

By KIRSTEN HAN

It looks like Singapore’s government is appointing itself Guardian of the Internet again. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Communications and Information announced a proposal for two codes of practice that would require social media companies to have “system-wide processes” to deal with sexual or violent content, and give authorities the power to order companies to disable access to specific content for users in Singapore.

It’s a clear progression from March, when the Minister for Communications and Information, Josephine Teo, said that the codes would focus on the three areas of child safety, user reporting and the accountability of social media platforms. There aren’t many more details at this stage, but the government says that these new powers are aimed at protecting people from harmful online content relating to self-harm, sexual harms, public health, public security, and racial and religious intolerance.

This is, by now, a familiar pattern. The government — dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP) for over 60 years — tends to present a threat, cast itself in the role of protector, then grant itself powers to regulate and censor. It’s how the government expands its power, even as it presents itself to the world as a problem-solver. We saw it in 2019 with the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), when the danger was “fake news,” and with the 2021 Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA), when hostile foreign meddlers were the big bad wolf at the door.

In both these cases, expansive laws allowed the government sweeping powers to issue orders demanding corrections, content removal, access blocks, and more, without checks and balances that inspire confidence. Monsters lurk on the internet, and Singapore’s government persists in the belief that it needs even more powers to deal with them.

What might fall afoul of the government’s safety concerns, you’re wondering? To give you an idea, the 2009 Public Order Act — ostensibly aimed at maintaining public safety — is so broad that even a single person can constitute an illegal assembly. On Friday, June 24, a friend and I spent almost three hours under investigation for this at the Bedok Police Division, where we were slapped with a further alleged offense of “illegal procession,” due to wearing anti-death-penalty T-shirts and walking to the police station from the market across the road (later found not to be an offense after all). Officers also suggested that I might be penalized for obstruction because I refused to hand over my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter passwords.

The PAP government has a habit of claiming harm as and when it suits them, and there are real reasons to worry about overreach, given its track record. To Singapore, with Love, an award-winning documentary film about Singapore’s political exiles, was banned from public screening in the country on the grounds of harming national security. More recently, the Ministry of Manpower refused to renew the work permit of a Bangladeshi worker who had been vocal about discriminatory and exploitative treatment of migrant workers in the country. It claimed, retrospectively, that a Facebook post he’d written over half a year ago could have incited other migrant workers into public disorder. It gels with a wider context of harassing or attacking activists and critics and enforcing laws that restrict basic civil liberties.

The authorities have also demanded Netflix remove shows with drug-related content from its offerings in Singapore, citing the need to “protect the young from unsuitable content (including inappropriate content that glorifies or encourages drug and substance abuse), maintain community norms and values, and safeguard public interests, while allowing adults to make informed choices.”

It doesn’t serve Singaporeans to have the government acting as our nanny, covering our eyes while clutching her pearls. When it seizes the power to decide whether the people are “reading the right thing,” it is depriving Singaporeans of opportunities to develop media literacy, exercise critical thinking, and become savvier navigators of online spaces. This benefits the government because it fosters among the people a culture of dependency on those in power to exercise control over all aspects of people’s lives. But it hurts Singaporeans by curbing our agency and freedom, trapping us mentally within authoritarian frames and environments.

This is, by now, a familiar pattern. The government — dominated by the People’s Action Party for over 60 years — tends to present a threat, casts itself in the role of protector, then grants itself powers to regulate and censor

POFMA allows any government minister to issue orders to correct, take down, or disable access to content, and compliance is mandated up front within a time frame set by the authorities, even if the recipient of the order later decides to appeal the order to the courts. FICA, which was passed in Parliament last October but hasn’t yet come into force, goes a step further by sidelining the courts completely; appeals against orders under FICA will only go to the Minister for Home Affairs or a government-appointed Reviewing Tribunal.

POFMA has been in effect for over two years. An analysis of POFMA’s use by digital rights researcher Teo Kai Xiang highlights that the “actors most frequently subject to correction directions are opposition groups or figures.” According to the same analysis, only a few recipients of POFMA orders have actually taken the step of challenging their order in court; these cases, once lodged, drag on for a long time. For instance, the opposition Singapore Democratic Party scored a minor victory in 2021 when the judge overturned one part of the POFMA orders it had received — only to receive a fresh POFMA order shortly after.

It’s not even clear if these wide powers mitigate the problems they’re supposed to be solving. Despite the introduction of POFMA as a tool to clamp down on misinformation, conspiracy theories and falsehoods have continued to flourish online, whether related to Covid-19 vaccines or propaganda narratives about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When people already believe in establishment plots and cover-ups, top-down POFMA orders from a state they distrust are unlikely to convince them otherwise.

It’s not that online harms don’t exist; they obviously do. And it’s not controversial to say that something needs to be done about horrors like child sexual exploitation and revenge porn. How social media companies can better address problematic content on their platforms is another, separate part of the equation. But we cannot allow authoritarian governments — by which I’m referring to not just Singapore’s but also other governments in Southeast Asia and beyond, who would all love to be able to control the content that shapes their people’s worldview — to exploit these genuine problems as opportunities to grab yet more power.

Kirsten Han is a journalist and activist based in Singapore.

‘Borjomi is for Borjomians, not for Russian oligarchs!’ When the Russian owner of a Georgian bottling plant came under sanctions, workers stopped getting paid.

Now they're fighting back.

A protest rally in Borjomi on June 16

Diana Shanava
Source: Meduza

In late April, the Georgian company IDS Borjomi, which sells mineral water under the brand name Borjomi, announced it was temporarily suspending operations at both of its bottling plants in Georgia due to financial difficulties resulting from the war in Ukraine. Oligarch Mikhail Fridman, owner of the Alfa Group, which owns a majority stake in the company, had come under sanctions. Now Alfa Group plans to donate its shares to Georgia — but this hasn’t helped the plants’ employees, who haven’t been paid in two months. Meduza takes a closer look at the town of Borjomi, where protests are ongoing.

About 60 employees of the Borjomi factory are sitting under a homemade canvas tent, where they’ve been since dawn. For over two weeks now, they’ve been protesting outside of the plant’s gates in the city named after the mineral watch company itself. Across from the protesters sit about fifty police officers who are prepared to arrest them if they decide to cross the street, though the officers do look fairly peaceful; they’ve left their weapons in their vehicles, and some of them aren’t even wearing their body armor.

“Borjomi is for Borjomians, not for Russian oligarchs!” reads a sign someone made by hand. Nearby, on a bus stop, there’s a banner labeled “Blacklist,” along with the names of 20 employees who have publicly opposed the protests and tried to dissuade their colleagues from participating. Some of the names are labeled “Judas.”

What happened to the Borjomi bottling plant?

The Borjomi employees’ protest began soon after April 29, when IDS Borjomi Georgia, the company that owns the local bottling plants, announced it was temporarily suspending production at two plants in Borjomi due to the war in Ukraine. Since 2013, the majority stake of IDS Borjomi International (which owns Borjomi Georgia) has been owned by Alfa Group, whose founder — Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman — became a target of Western sanctions after the start of the war.

According to a statement from the company, the sanctions effectively made the plant’s operations impossible — largely because the company lost access to its bank accounts. Plant employees stopped being paid and were offered new contracts — under which they would be paid only half of their previous salaries. The majority of employees told the company’s leadership that they would agree under the condition that their old salaries be restored as soon as the plant resumes normal operations. The company refused, and after a protest on May 5, 49 employees were fired. Most of them were forklift or delivery drivers.

Andro Biblidze is one of the 49 workers who got fired that day. He worked at the plant for over 25 years, transporting materials between departments on a forklift. Biblidze told Meduza that his issues with the company’s leadership began in May 2021, but the problem was initially resolved promptly:

My manager had promised me 1200 lari [about $400; the average monthly salary in Georgia at that time was 1,191 lari ($383)] for 24 days of work. But for some reason, it always ended up being less. People began striking for better pay. After that, the workers met with the plant’s management. They promised me 1,500 lari [about $500] for 24 days, and everyone was satisfied with the conditions. Everyone signed a new contract and returned to work.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, according to Andro, the plant’s leadership brought the employees new contracts. Under the new conditions, if production stopped, the employees would receive half of their salary. If the plant stayed open, the workers would be paid on an hourly basis.

In this case, we would be better off with hourly wages than with half of our salary. But production was suspended the entire time [and we didn’t get paid at all]. Since April, they haven’t even paid us the 50 percent they promised us if the plant was closed.

According to Andro, all of the workers who refused to sign the new contract were fired. Most of them were employees who had signed temporary contracts that lasted from three to six months. Workers with permanent contracts weren’t fired.
Back to the picket line

On May 19, several weeks after the plants shut down, Alfa Group released a statement saying that it planned to donate a portion of its stake in Borjomi to the Georgian government. As a result, Mikhail Fridman would no longer own the majority stake, which would allow the plant to access its accounts and resume operations. According to Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, the donated share is worth $100 million.

A week later, IDS Borjomi Georgia employees reached an agreement with the company’s leadership. According to trade union representative Georgy Diasamidze, who helped organize the protests at Borjomi, the company promised to increase the employees’ salaries and to maintain their existing benefits packages. The leadership emphasized that there wouldn’t be any consequences for the workers who had gone on strike. Driver Andro Biblidze recounted the conversation:

After Prime Minister Garibashvili came out [with his statement] and said it was good news for Borjomi workers, I got a message from our plant's management. They promised not hourly wages but fixed wages, which, according to the contract, would be half the amount I’d been getting before April. That’s what we agreed on. We understood that there was a war, a crisis. But even after that, no payments came.

On May 31, the workers started striking again. Almost 800 of them set up tents outside of the plant and started holding protests, unhappy with the new conditions the company's leadership was offering them. They promised they were in it for the long haul.




The workers, who hadn’t been paid for April and May, demanded “the immediate reinstatement” of their 49 fired coworkers' employment, the restoration of their previous contracts, a transition from temporary to permanent contracts, and “a collective agreement to protect the rights of factory workers.”

Georgy Diasamidze emphasized that the workers will continue protests until the plant’s managers meet their demands:

For many Borjomi residents, working in the plant is the only possible income source. 4,500 of the 10,500 residents of Borjomi work in the plant. There are entire families that work here. Given that they haven’t been paid for two months now, it’s not clear how they’re supposed to live or support their children.

Refusing to compromise

IDS Borjomi Georgia spokesperson Naniko Kuprashvili did not respond to Meduza’s question about why the plant workers haven’t been paid their salaries. He said that the company won’t comment on the conflict while the negotiations are ongoing.

On June 9, Georgian Ombudsman Nino Lomdjaria visited the protesters in Borjomi. Lomdjaria said she was aware of the pressure and intimidation being used against employees; she reported later that the workers said the company’s management had threatened to fire them for taking part in the protests, and had promised to pay only workers who didn’t participate. Lomdjaria vowed to start an investigation based on the allegations.

Several days later, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that the Georgian government had completed negotiations with Mikhail Fridman for the donated stake in the company. All of the problems at the plant, he promised, would soon be resolved.

According to union representative Georgy Diasamidze, after Garibashvili’s statement, the protesters had some hope that their problems would indeed be resolved soon, but several days later, nothing had changed. So on June 16, they decided to block the road in front of the city administration building. That day, however, representatives from the Health Ministry got in touch with the workers and invited them to a closed meeting.

Diasamidze said that the protesters were offered 10,000 lari (about $3,400) each in compensation, but they refused, as the offer fell short of their list of demands. Now, all of the plant’s workers, with the exception of the 400 administrative employees, have joined the protest. “We’re continuing to protest and continuing to fight for our rights,” said Diasamidze.

Story by Diana Shanava
Translation by Sam Breazeale