Oxfam
274 Banbury Road
Oxford 0X2 7DZ
16 April 2003

Dear Oxfam,

We write from the daily Anti-War Picket on Parliament Square called by the Global Women's Strike.

On Monday 31 March, it was brought to the picket’s attention that over five million tons of infant formula had arrived in Iraq as part of the UK's "humanitarian" aid. This will be distributed by the military, which will also advise mothers how to use it. We are sceptical to say the least. First of all: How? And in what language?

We were glad to hear that Oxfam pointed out that babies given the powdered milk are at high risk of becoming ill and dying in places where safe water is not available to mix up the formula. For example, in Basra the water purification plant was not functioning due to the US bombing. Even before the war started, only 53% of people had access to clean water as a result of the 1991 Gulf war. (Before then, 92% of people had clean water.) The US military was then privatising the clean water sent as humanitarian aid, in order to "revitalise" the local economy it had destroyed.* So people who have nothing have had to pay for water. We on the Picket were outraged. We decided to write to let you know what we thought and to ask for further information.

Although you pointed to the dangers of unsafe water, we did not hear that you protested about formula being sent in any case, especially labelled as "humanitarian" aid. And it comes with the backing of Clare Short’s Department for International Development.

Formula is a weapon of mass destruction. Even before polluted water is added, because formula is made from cheap waste ingredients, it is often contaminated with bacteria and other pollutants. As you know, it silently kills 1.5 million infants a year, mainly in the South. The same governments that have been bombing civilians and destroying the infrastructure of survival have actively promoted genocide by supporting the formula companies internationally in all kinds of ways.^**

Now in wartime they are further attacking breastfeeding when its life-saving properties are most desperately needed. They are using both bombs and formula to kill. And part of the soldiers' killing role is to be distributors for the formula companies.

Formula targets the most vulnerable civilians. Breastfeeding, source of the basic survival food of humanity, is seen as some subsidiary biological (and therefore unimportant) activity that only women are involved in. The global market can push it aside without any outcry from organisations claiming to protect us, and enable formula to take over. Using the excuse that there is a crisis, they in fact worsen the crisis, putting infants further at risk. The interests of women and children and even their survival seem to count for nothing.

We note that Oxfam and other aid agencies are keen to distribute aid themselves instead of the military. Can you tell us as a matter of priority: what is your position on the distribution of formula? And do you have any plans to support and protect breastfeeding? Surely you will not be pressing mothers made desperate by their own and their children’s hunger into using formula. Will you instead insist that breastfeeding mothers are given extra food and enough clean drinking water so that they can feed their children themselves with breast milk?

Breastfeeding mothers will be among the dead and injured. The formula companies, which have always lived up to the name of ‘baby killers’ given them by the pro-breastfeeding movement, also have an interest in mothers being killed. We hope you will agree that they must not be allowed to profit from such deaths while being seen as benefactors. Donor milk or wet nursing can be organised as the alternatives to formula if only a bit of the resources used for weapons and their delivery of death are used for the protection of life. But first of all they must stop killing mothers.

We don’t know the details of the deal to bring formula to Iraq. (If you know please tell us.) We do know that already breastfeeding has been undermined in Iraq through 12 years of draconian sanctions. Powdered milk was included in the meagre weekly food aid provided to many families with small children. Mothers were malnourished. In part due to less breastfeeding, child malnutrition and deaths tripled. In response to this, a movement, no doubt begun by women, had started to promote breastfeeding, and before the current war the high child death rate had begun to go down.

Yours sincerely,

Signed by 105 women and men on the picket.

Copy to: Rosemary Thorpe, Chair, Oxfam
Barbara Stocking, Director, Oxfam