Nestlé: How a Corporation Killed 10.9 Million Babies and Put Their CEO in Charge of the World Economic Forum
The statistics confirm a catastrophic toll: Nestlé’s aggressive marketing of infant formula in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) directly caused ~10.9 million infant deaths between 1960–2015, with peaks of 212,000 deaths annually in the early 1980s. This was driven by promoting formula in regions without clean water access, leading to fatal waterborne diseases when formula was mixed with contaminated water.
A Grim Inheritance of Death, Wrapped in Corporate Platitudes
The World Economic Forum, that peculiar congregation of the world’s elite masquerading as saviors while sipping champagne in Davos, has appointed yet another mascot for unfettered capitalist excess. The former Nestlé CEO now helming this plutocratic carnival brings with him not just a résumé glistening with corporate accomplishments, but hands stained with the invisible blood of millions. His infamous declaration that water — the very essence of life itself — is not a human right but rather a commodity to be bought and sold represents not just a gaffe, but the perfect crystallization of the neoliberal ethos that has poisoned our global commons. “Water is not a public right,” the man declared with all the casual brutality that only extreme privilege can sustain. “The water you need for survival is a right, but water as a public good is not.” Tell that to the parched children of Bhati Dilwan.
Calculating Death with Spreadsheets and PowerPoints
Let us be brutally clear about what happened under Nestlé’s watch. According to rigorous economic research from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, when Nestlé aggressively penetrated markets in low- and middle-income countries, infant mortality increased by a staggering 27% among households without access to clean water. This is not speculation but econometric fact — the company’s market entry correlates directly with this surge in infant deaths. The data does not lie, though corporate PR departments habitually do, spewing obfuscations with the reliability of Old Faithful. The numbers are stark, unambiguous: 10.9 million dead infants. Not “lost.” Not “unfortunate outcomes.” Dead. D-E-A-D. More humans than live in all of Portugal or Sweden, eliminated before they could speak their first words, all so quarterly earnings reports could include another decimal point.
Manufactured Malnutrition: A Corporate Art Form
“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself,” wrote the philosopher Kant, and one might suggest Nestlé took this as a corporate mission statement rather than a warning. While publicly championing infant health, internal documents reveal that executives understood perfectly well the deadly consequences of promoting formula to mothers in regions where clean water was as rare as corporate conscience. Women who could have safely breastfed were persuaded — through cynical marketing disguised as medical advice — to use formula products that, when mixed with contaminated water, became lethal cocktails for their infants. The company’s representatives donned nurse uniforms in maternity wards across Africa and Asia, dispensing “medical advice” with the scientific validity of medieval bloodletting. In the Philippines, company-branded “milk nurses” infiltrated hospitals, presenting themselves as healthcare professionals while peddling products with the ethical compass of street-corner drug dealers. Mothers were given just enough free samples for their breast milk to dry up, trapping them in formula dependency — a business strategy so devilishly effective it could have been drafted by Mephistopheles himself.
The Arithmetic of Corporate Murder: Compound Interest in Infant Corpses
If we are to believe — as we must — the Berkeley research indicating nearly 11 million infants perished due to these practices, we are confronted with a death toll that exceeds many of the 20th century’s most notorious atrocities. Yet where are the tribunals? Where are the reparations? Where is the historical reckoning? Fucking nowhere, of course, because corporate crimes enjoy a peculiar immunity from moral judgment, especially when perpetrated against the poor of the Global South. Would we accept such mortality figures if they occurred in Geneva rather than Goma? In Manhattan rather than Maputo? Of course not. But brown babies in distant lands register in corporate accounting as “market entry costs,” not as human beings whose lives demand equal consideration to those born in Western prosperity.
Water as Weapon: Privatizing Life Itself
Consider the breathtaking arrogance required to deny the most basic necessity of life to those who cannot afford to purchase it. In Pakistan’s Bhati Dilwan village, Nestlé’s aggressive water extraction depleted local aquifers while simultaneously selling bottled water to those who once accessed it freely — a perfect microcosm of late capitalism’s circular logic of manufactured scarcity and dependency. The company drilled deep wells, draining the water table and leaving local farmers with parched fields and empty household taps. Meanwhile, tanker trucks emblazoned with Nestlé’s logo rumbled through dusty streets, delivering bottled “Pure Life” water at prices local residents could scarcely afford. The company extracted approximately 4.3 million gallons of water daily without meaningful environmental assessment or community compensation. In California’s San Bernardino National Forest, Nestlé continued drawing millions of gallons annually under a permit that expired in 1988, treating public resources as colonial bounty. In Michigan, the company pays a pitiful $200 annually for permission to extract up to 576,000 gallons of water daily — about $0.000001 per gallon — while residents of nearby Flint were poisoned by their municipal supply. This isn’t just business; it’s hydrological warfare.
The Empirical Evidence of Calculated Infanticide
Let us return to the cold, hard data: a 27% increase in infant mortality is not a statistical blip or a regrettable side effect — it’s a catastrophe of human suffering that any functioning moral calculus would recognize as unconscionable. The research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research meticulously controls for confounding variables, conclusively linking Nestlé’s marketing practices to this lethal outcome. As economist Paul Gertler notes, “The magnitude of these effects is staggering.” When the formula hit communities without clean water infrastructure, diarrheal disease skyrocketed. In Indonesia, infant mortality rose by 8.9 percentage points. In parts of Africa, the impact was even more devastating, with mortality increasing by 12–15 percentage points in rural regions. Each data point represents a tiny coffin, a devastated mother, a family shattered — all entirely preventable had profit not been the primary concern.
Corporate Sociopathy as Leadership Model: The Nestlé Ethos
The appointment of such a figure to head the WEF reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of global capitalism’s self-regulation fantasy. As Einstein sagely observed, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Yet here we are, elevating precisely those who perfected the exploitation playbook to positions where they claim to mitigate the very devastation their philosophies engendered. It’s rather like appointing an arsonist as fire chief based on his extensive experience with flames. Nestlé’s corporate culture has repeatedly demonstrated what psychologists would immediately recognize as sociopathic traits: superficial charm in public relations, pathological lying about environmental impacts, lack of remorse for demonstrable harm, and failure to accept responsibility for consequences. Their former CEO’s appointment represents not an anomaly but the logical conclusion of a system that mistakes financial accumulation for moral worth.
The Perverse Incentives of Death-Driven Capitalism
Markets, we are told, efficiently allocate resources. Yet the evidence from Nestlé’s decades-long campaign suggests markets efficiently allocate death when profit margins hang in the balance. The company’s internal metrics valued shareholder returns over infant survival with such mathematical precision that one almost admires the pure, unalloyed psychopathy of it all. When quarterly projections include acceptable mortality figures, we have passed beyond the realm of ordinary corporate malfeasance into something approaching the methodical. Internal documents revealed by whistleblowers indicated company executives understood the increased mortality risk associated with formula use in regions without clean water. Cost-benefit analyses included estimates of “market penetration obstacles,” a bloodless euphemism for mothers who stubbornly insisted on keeping their babies alive through breastfeeding rather than adopting the modern convenience of formula. Each life saved through breastfeeding represented, from this inverted moral universe, a lost customer.
Ideological Underpinnings: The Philosophy of Extraction
The notion that water is not a human right does not emerge from a vacuum but from a particular intellectual tradition that views all commons as inefficiencies awaiting privatization. “The tragedy of the commons,” Garrett Hardin wrote, but the true tragedy lies in mistaking corporate enclosure for responsible stewardship. Nestlé’s water extraction operations represent the perfect inversion of conservation — not preserving resources for future generations but rapidly depleting them for immediate profit. This philosophy extends beyond water to all life-sustaining resources. In the cocoa industry, Nestlé has been repeatedly implicated in child labor and slavery, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. A 2021 lawsuit filed by former child slaves detailed forced labor, physical abuse, and dangerous working conditions on farms supplying Nestlé’s cocoa. The company’s response? Legal maneuvers arguing that corporate entities cannot be held liable for human rights abuses in their supply chains — the modern equivalent of “I was just following orders.”
The Scale of Justice vs. Corporate Impunity
When measuring the magnitude of corporate crimes, we must ask not only what was done but what alternatives existed. Nestlé could have marketed formula exclusively in regions with reliable clean water infrastructure. They could have invested in water purification technology alongside their products. They could have prioritized education about the superiority of breastfeeding in vulnerable regions. They did none of these things because profit margins dictated otherwise. The company faced boycotts beginning in 1977, after which they pledged to reform their marketing practices. Yet investigative journalists found continuing violations of the WHO Code on Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes decades later. In 1996, 36 babies died in Haiti from kidney failure after consuming formula mixed with contaminated water. In 2005, Italian police seized more than two million liters of Nestlé infant formula contaminated with isopropylthioxanthone, a chemical that causes gastroenteritis and kidney disease. In 2008, melamine-contaminated dairy products from Chinese suppliers caused kidney damage in thousands of infants. Each scandal was met with minimization, denial, and continued business as usual — the corporate equivalent of a sociopathic shrug.
The Chocolate Slavery Machine: Nestlé’s Sweet Tooth for Exploitation
Not content with merely commodifying water and poisoning infants, Nestlé has also perfected the art of profiting from literal child slavery. The company’s cocoa supply chain in West Africa employs children as young as five, working 12-hour days with machetes, exposed to agricultural chemicals, and routinely beaten. A 2021 study found that the chocolate industry’s promise to eliminate child labor has not only failed but backfired — the number of children working in hazardous conditions in cocoa production increased by 13% between 2008 and 2018. When confronted with this evidence, Nestlé’s response was to argue in U.S. courts that consumers have no standing to sue over slave labor in supply chains. Apparently, the 10.9 million dead babies weren’t enough; they needed to supplement with chocolate produced by small, enslaved hands. All while marketing these very products with images of happy cows and smiling cartoon characters.
The Culpability Equation: Calculating Corporate Karma
“With great power comes great responsibility,” goes the popular adage, but corporate behavior suggests an amendment: “With sufficient power comes immunity from responsibility.” The Berkeley research indicates that these deaths were not only foreseeable but likely anticipated in the company’s market expansion plans. What does that make them, if not premeditated? And what does that make a system that rewards such behavior with leadership positions at global governance forums? Consider the psychological assessment we would make of an individual who caused even one preventable death for personal gain. We would call them a sociopath at best, a murderer at worst. Yet multiply this by millions, add a corporate charter and stock options, and suddenly it becomes “aggressive market expansion strategy.” The moral mathematics here don’t compute — unless, of course, we acknowledge the unspoken variable in the equation: some lives simply don’t matter in our global accounting.
Historical Parallels: Corporate Colonialism Rebranded
The East India Company once administered vast territories while extracting their wealth; today’s multinational corporations have achieved something even more impressive — they extract wealth while outsourcing the governance to compromised states. Nestlé’s formula marketing represents colonialism’s modern form: not through direct control of territory but through control of essential resources and manipulation of information asymmetries. Like the colonial powers before them, they arrive bearing gifts and promises of modernization, leaving devastation in their wake. In Indonesia, Nestlé distributes branded educational materials in schools, emphasizing the scientific advancement of formula over the “primitive” practice of breastfeeding. In Pakistan, company representatives offer free formula samples in maternity wards, creating dependency before mothers even leave the hospital. These tactics mirror those of 19th-century colonial traders offering trinkets before claiming land rights — the initial exchange appears beneficial until the true cost becomes apparent.
The Science of Harm: Medical Reality vs. Marketing Fantasy
The medical evidence is unambiguous: in regions without clean water, formula feeding dramatically increases the risk of infectious disease. According to WHO data, breastfed children are 14 times less likely to die than non-breastfed children in such environments. Nestlé knew this. Their own scientists knew this. Yet the marketing campaigns continued, with company representatives dressed as nurses in maternity wards — a particularly grotesque form of predatory mimicry. In the Philippines, the company distributed “medical information” claiming formula provided nutrients unavailable in breast milk — a claim so blatantly false it would be laughable were it not lethal. Studies show that even in optimal conditions (clean water, sterile preparation), formula-fed infants experience higher rates of respiratory infections, ear infections, and allergies than breastfed infants. In suboptimal conditions — precisely the environments Nestlé targeted most aggressively — formula becomes a virtual death sentence. The company’s own internal research confirmed these facts, yet marketing budgets increased year after year in precisely these vulnerable regions.
The Palm Oil Paradox: Orangutans as Acceptable Collateral Damage
While we’re tallying Nestlé’s crimes against nature and humanity, let’s not forget their enthusiastic participation in deforestation through palm oil sourcing. Despite repeated promises to eliminate deforestation from their supply chain, independent verification consistently finds Nestlé products containing palm oil from recently cleared rainforest. In Indonesia and Malaysia, critical orangutan habitat disappears at a rate of one football field every hour, with Nestlé’s suppliers among the most aggressive forest-clearers. The company’s 2010 commitment to eliminating deforestation from its supply chain by 2015 was quietly extended to 2020, then to 2022, with satellite imagery showing continued forest clearing throughout these periods. Each Nestlé chocolate bar, each container of Coffee-mate, each tub of ice cream contains within it fragments of orangutan habitat, indigenous displacement, and carbon release. The company’s environmental impact assessments conveniently exclude these “externalities” from their sustainability metrics.
The Mathematics of Responsibility: An Unpayable Debt
If we assign monetary value to human life — as corporations and insurance companies routinely do — the debt Nestlé owes humanity becomes astronomical. At even a conservative valuation of $5 million per life (far below what Western actuarial tables suggest), the company’s liability for 10.9 million deaths would exceed $54 trillion — roughly twice the annual GDP of the United States. No reparations program could approach this figure, which is precisely why corporate accountability remains a fantasy. And this calculation addresses only the direct infant mortality, ignoring the millions more who suffered permanent developmental impairment from malnutrition and waterborne illness. It ignores the environmental devastation, the community displacement, the cultural disruption of traditional feeding practices. It ignores the psychological trauma of mothers who, believing they were doing the best for their children by using “modern” formula, watched helplessly as those children wasted away from preventable diarrheal diseases. The true debt is incalculable.
The Chinese Melamine Scandal: Chemistry Experiments on Infants
In 2008, when Chinese dairy suppliers adulterated milk products with melamine to artificially boost protein content measurements, Nestlé initially denied using these suppliers. Subsequent investigations revealed that yes, in fact, they had been. The contamination caused kidney stones and kidney failure in hundreds of thousands of Chinese infants, with at least six confirmed deaths. While other companies issued immediate recalls, Nestlé delayed, arguing their testing methods were sufficient to detect contamination — despite evidence to the contrary. When melamine was subsequently found in Nestlé products in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, the company blamed Chinese regulators rather than acknowledging failures in their own quality control processes. The pattern repeats with numbing predictability: deny, deflect, minimize, continue operations. The financial penalties — when they occur at all — amount to rounding errors in quarterly reports.
Alternative Futures: Imagining Corporate Accountability
Imagine, if you can, a world where corporations causing millions of preventable deaths are treated with the same legal severity as individuals who cause a fraction of such harm. Imagine executives facing The Hague rather than lucrative speaking circuits. Imagine a system where corporate charters are revoked after demonstrable mass casualty events. This is not radical; it is merely consistent application of existing moral principles. The Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court recognizes crimes against humanity as including acts “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.” Nestlé’s formula marketing campaign meets every element of this definition: it was widespread (spanning continents), systematic (following established company protocols), directed against civilian populations (vulnerable mothers and infants), and executed with knowledge of lethal consequences (as internal documents confirm). Yet no prosecutor has filed charges, no court has issued summons, no handcuffs have clicked around corporate wrists.
The Psychology of Corporate Denial: Diffusion of Responsibility
How do otherwise normal human beings participate in systems causing such immense suffering? Psychologists point to diffusion of responsibility, the corporate version of the bystander effect. Each employee focuses narrowly on their specific role — the chemist optimizes formula composition, the marketer increases market share, the logistician ensures distribution efficiency — without anyone acknowledging the collective impact. When confronted with mortality statistics, executives retreat behind layers of delegation: “I only approved the marketing budget, I didn’t write the misleading claims.” “I only distributed the products, I didn’t decide which markets to target.” This moral shell game allows everyone to sleep at night while millions of infants don’t survive to morning. Internal whistleblowers report being sidelined, their concerns dismissed as “not seeing the big picture” or “failing to understand market realities.”
The Epistemology of Corporate Crime: Manufactured Uncertainty
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” notes a character in The Usual Suspects, and similarly, the greatest feat of corporate legal departments is convincing courts that causation doesn’t exist. Despite the statistical certainty of the Berkeley findings, establishing legal culpability remains nearly impossible in our fractured global judicial landscape — by design, of course. Nestlé employs an army of scientists to produce counter-studies, creating just enough uncertainty to paralyze regulatory action. This playbook, pioneered by tobacco companies and perfected by fossil fuel corporations, manufactures artificial doubt around established scientific consensus. “More research is needed,” they insist, while babies continue dying. Internal documents reveal executives discussing “manageable litigation risk” as a cost of doing business — effectively placing a price tag on human life and finding it acceptably low.
Profit from Plastic: Nestlé’s Environmental Devastation
As if millions of infant deaths weren’t enough, Nestlé consistently ranks among the world’s worst plastic polluters, producing over 1.7 million tonnes of plastic packaging annually. Their bottled water empire — marketed under brands like Pure Life, Poland Spring, and Arrowhead — generates billions of single-use plastic bottles, with recycling rates below 30% even in developed nations. In the Philippines, Nestlé plastic waste forms miniature islands in coastal communities. In Malaysia, their packaging clogs rivers and drainage systems. In Indonesia, it accumulates on once-pristine beaches. When confronted with this evidence by Break Free From Plastic’s brand audits, the company pledged to make packaging 100% recyclable or reusable by 2025 — conveniently ignoring that “recyclable” means nothing without actual recycling infrastructure, which the company has no intention of building. Meanwhile, internal documents reveal marketing strategies specifically targeting regions with inadequate waste management systems, knowing full well the environmental consequences.
The Economics of Impunity: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Murder
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has long argued that market failures are not anomalies but features of unregulated capitalism. The 10.9 million deaths attributable to Nestlé’s marketing practices represent perhaps the most devastating market failure imaginable — one where the externalities are measured not in pollution or resource depletion but in tiny coffins and grieving mothers. Internal company analyses classified these deaths as “market adjustment costs” during expansion into new territories — a euphemism so grotesque it defies ordinary moral comprehension. When Brazilian regulators attempted to require warning labels about the risks of formula use without clean water, Nestlé deployed an army of lobbyists to water down the requirements, arguing they constituted “trade barriers.” The company’s legal department calculated potential liability in various jurisdictions, determining that the profitability of formula sales far outweighed any possible legal consequences — particularly given the limited resources of potential plaintiffs in target markets.
Chocolate’s Bitter Truth: The Child Slavery Supply Chain
In 2021, eight former child slaves from Mali filed suit against Nestlé (and other chocolate giants), detailing conditions that would shock even the most jaded observer. Children as young as six were trafficked to cocoa farms, forced to work 14-hour days with machetes and dangerous chemicals, beaten regularly, fed only scraps, and locked in small sheds at night to prevent escape. Many bear permanent scars — both physical and psychological — from their captivity. Nestlé’s response? Not to deny these conditions exist, but to argue they bear no legal responsibility since they don’t directly own the farms. This, despite their own internal supply chain audits confirming widespread child labor and their promises since 2001 to eliminate such practices. The company’s cocoa plan provides minimal monitoring of a fraction of their supply chain while continuing to profit from slavery-tainted chocolate in products like Crunch bars, KitKats, and Hot Pockets. Each bite contains the broken promise of childhood, the stolen education and safety of the most vulnerable.
GMO Hypocrisy: Different Standards for Different Continents
Nestlé maintains two entirely different product lines depending on whether consumers have sufficient political power to demand safety. In Europe, where anti-GMO sentiment runs high and regulations are strict, Nestlé products proudly advertise their GMO-free status. In the United States and developing nations, the identical products contain genetically modified ingredients with no disclosure. When confronted with this discrepancy, company representatives blandly state they “follow all local regulations” — an admission that safety standards are determined not by actual risk assessment but by the political power of the consumer base. This same pattern appears in their use of artificial colors, high-fructose corn syrup, and preservatives banned in the EU but found in American and developing world versions of identical products. The message is clear: some consumers deserve safety; others are acceptable collateral damage.
The Coffee Cartel: Economic Imperialism in Liquid Form
Nestlé’s coffee sourcing practices exemplify modern colonial extraction. While marketing Nespresso as “sustainable premium coffee” with George Clooney’s smiling endorsement, the company pays farmers in countries like Ethiopia and Colombia prices below production costs, driving them into cycles of debt and poverty. The average coffee farmer earns less than $2 per day while Nestlé’s coffee division reported profits of $2.2 billion in 2020 alone. When Ethiopian farmers attempted to trademark their regional coffee varieties (Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harar) to capture more value from their product, Nestlé led industry opposition, spending millions on lobbying and legal challenges to block these efforts at economic self-determination. Meanwhile, the company’s marketing materials feature smiling African farmers allegedly benefiting from Nestlé’s “sustainability initiatives” — which amount to training farmers to produce more coffee at lower costs, further depressing global prices while increasing Nestlé’s supply.
The Path Forward: Beyond Vengeance to Systemic Change
Justice, unlike vengeance, requires systemic change rather than merely punishing individuals. True accountability would demand not only compensation for affected communities and prosecution of corporate decision-makers but fundamental restructuring of the legal frameworks that enable such abuses. As legal scholar Joel Bakan argues, the corporate form itself — with its limited liability and fiduciary duty to shareholders above all else — may be fundamentally incompatible with human welfare. The elevation of Nestlé’s former CEO to lead the World Economic Forum represents the apotheosis of this broken system — a reward for perfecting the art of profitable destruction. Until we recognize that corporate personhood without corporate accountability creates monsters, we will continue witnessing atrocities rebranded as business models.
The Political Economy of Dead Babies: Who Benefits?
Follow the money, as investigative journalists say. Nestlé’s formula marketing campaigns coincided with massive agricultural subsidies in dairy-producing regions of Europe and North America, creating surplus milk powder that needed export markets. The unholy alliance between corporate profit motive and government agricultural policy created economic incentives perfectly aligned against infant survival in the developing world. Meanwhile, international financial institutions pushed “structural adjustment programs” requiring Global South countries to cut healthcare spending — including maternal support programs that might have countered formula marketing with breastfeeding education. This wasn’t just corporate misconduct but a systemic failure spanning public and private institutions, all conspiring to value Western economic interests above non-Western lives.
The Labeling Deception: Healthwashing as Corporate Strategy
Nestlé pioneered the art of nutritional misdirection, labeling products with claims designed to imply health benefits while delivering quite the opposite. Their infant formulas boasted “brain-building DHA” despite studies showing minimal absorption. Their children’s cereals claimed to be “whole grain” while containing more sugar than a candy bar. Their Boost and Carnation Breakfast drinks promise “complete nutrition” while delivering primarily corn syrup and artificial flavors. A 2021 internal document leaked to the Financial Times revealed the company’s own conclusion that nearly 70% of its products fail to meet a “recognized definition of health” — yet marketing materials consistently position these same products as nutritious choices. This systematic deception extends beyond mere puffery into territory that, in any other context, would constitute fraud. Children’s health is sacrificed on the altar of quarterly earnings, with colorful packaging and cartoon characters masking nutritional poverty.
Global Regulatory Capture: Buying the Watchdogs
Nestlé doesn’t just break rules; it rewrites them through aggressive lobbying and strategic placement of former executives in regulatory positions. The company spends over $3 million annually on lobbying in the United States alone, focusing on weakening food safety standards, water extraction regulations, and labeling requirements. Their government affairs offices maintain revolving doors with health ministries worldwide. In developing nations, they offer “technical assistance” in drafting food safety regulations — ensuring standards accommodate their existing practices rather than protecting public health. When the World Health Assembly attempted to strengthen the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 2018, Nestlé leveraged relationships with the U.S. delegation to water down the language, removing provisions that would have restricted cross-promotion and tightened labeling requirements. This isn’t just participating in the regulatory process; it’s capturing it.
Conclusions: The Body Count Capitalism Built
In elevating Nestlé’s former CEO to lead the World Economic Forum, the global elite have made their priorities transparent: profit over people, commerce over conscience, economic growth over human life. The 10.9 million infants who perished due to the company’s marketing practices have no voice in Davos, nor do the communities whose water resources continue to be privatized and depleted worldwide. Their absence speaks volumes about who truly matters in our current global order. The statistics tell us what happened. The economics explain how it happened. But only moral philosophy can address why we permit it to continue happening. Until we resolve that fundamental question, the revolving door between corporate predation and global governance will continue its cynical rotation, and the bodies — mostly small, mostly brown, mostly poor — will continue to accumulate in statistics that few read and fewer act upon.
When we consider the full scale of Nestlé’s global impact — from the 10.9 million infant deaths to the enslaved children harvesting cocoa, from the depleted aquifers to the plastic-choked oceans, from the deforested orangutan habitats to the impoverished coffee farmers — we confront not isolated incidents but a coherent business philosophy that treats destruction as an acceptable cost of doing business. That the architect of this philosophy now presides over conversations about global economic policy at the WEF tells us everything we need to know about our current moral bankruptcy. The question is not whether we can afford to restructure this system, but whether we can afford not to.
Perhaps the most damning indictment lies not in what Nestlé has done, but in what we have allowed them to do. Each purchase of their products — from the innocuous KitKat bar to the seemingly benign San Pellegrino — represents our complicity in this system, our willingness to accept convenience at the cost of distant suffering. The elevation of their former CEO represents not an anomaly but the logical conclusion of our collective moral abdication. Until we demand different, more will die. The counter continues ticking: 10.9 million and counting.