O MATADOR DE BEBES 2023 (3rd ed) (original) (raw)

"The Baby Killer" (trans) 3rd Brazilian edition of 1974 publication PREFACE (translated) It is a surprise and honour that, almost fifty years later, there is still an interest in publishing a new edition of The Baby Killer in Brazil. It’s an honour that it is still considered to be relevant. And it is a surprise because so much excellent technical and political work has subsequently been done to protect young children from forces that see baby food as just one more business opportunity. History is important. In today’s connected world, we often fail to reflect on the past that brought us here or how progress can be sustained into the future. So there are some important lessons to be learnt from The Baby Killer and the events that followed its publication. The starting point is to recognise the need for sustained public attention to issues that affect the health and well-being of our societies. Each new generation of parents needs to understand how to bring up healthy children. It is the responsibility of activists and communities as well as progressive professionals and politicians to ensure that the information they are offered and the way it is communicated is appropriate and relevant to their current circumstances. Ongoing vigilance and action will always be needed to protect and advance the gains that have been made. Old concerns must be translated into messages that are relevant to new contexts. It was easy to identify milk marketing when it was carried out directly by company employees engaging with mothers and health professionals, using traditional advertising media to reinforce their marketing messages. It is more difficult in a digital world in which there is competition for ‘eyeballs’ and messages can be more subtle and transmitted through many channels that are often difficult to identify and monitor. Public health policies and programmes must also recognise the social changes that have occurred in Brazil and elsewhere, particularly in the role of women in society and the economy. Those changes must be reflected in the way we think about and organise child care. However, while societies have changed dramatically over the past 5 decades, the fundamental interests of private corporations have remained the same: their business is to make profits for their shareholders and to find new ways to do it. This is not to say that they do not develop many valuable innovations and make important products available. The challenge for society is to try and ensure, through regulation and other interventions, that what they do serves the wider public interest and does not just maximise private profits. In this context, work in public health is often inherently political. Apparently dry technical statistics on morbidity and mortality are a reflection of the state of society and the lives of 34 different communities within it. We need to understand what the global food industry does (and does not do) and how it impacts peoples’ lives and wellbeing. It is important to keep challenging the companies, and the governments that should regulate them, to do better. In too many countries, wealthier members of society are well served by commercial enterprise. Meanwhile, poor people cannot access affordable and nutritious food because food production, markets and distribution are shaped by corporate not community interests. Perhaps the most important lesson from The Baby Killer and the campaigns that were subsequently launched to control the commercialisation of infant feeding, is that organised collective action can achieve substantial change, locally, nationally and internationally. The global baby food campaigns began before the public Internet had even been invented, when international telephone calls were impossibly expensive and international travel was difficult, particularly for people in poorer countries. Much of the action had to be organised at local level; communication between countries was by old-fashioned postal correspondence and there were only occasional face to face meetings. Despite those difficulties - or perhaps because we had to be more organised in our work - those early efforts achieved significant results. The challenge in today’s complex, interconnected world is to find ways to interact and coordinate in a strategic and organised manner. The Baby Killer and the campaigns that followed focused on common goals that were easy to understand and widely supported. It may be that the initial sharp focus guided those involved into more structured and systematic analysis, cooperation and action and helped them to mobilise the support that has assured their subsequent success. Mike Muller March 2023.