Global News Journal

China baby milk scandal highlights decline in breastfeeding

By Juhie Bhatia

Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content of this post – the views are the author’s alone.

Health authorities in China reported this week that nearly 53,000 children have become sick after consuming tainted infant formula. As the effects of these contaminated dairy products become more widespread, many are discussing the alternative to formula — breastfeeding.

The scandal erupted earlier this month when Sanlu, China’s top-selling infant formula manufacturer, publicly recalled its products. The baby formula was deliberately contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical that can cause kidney problems. Since then, thousands of children have become sick and the milk powder has been blamed for the deaths of four infants. The crisis has not only raised questions about food safety, but also about why so many children are being fed formula in the first place, instead of being breastfed.

Thanks to its numerous health benefits, the World Health Organization recommends that children be breastfed exclusively for the first six months of life. However, despite a long tradition of breastfeeding in China, rates have declined as more mothers turn to milk formula. The rates of exclusive breastfeeding during an infant’s first four months decreased from around 76 percent in 1998 to 64 percent in 2004. At six months, the percentage of babies being exclusively breastfed is only 51 percent.

Many blame China’s shift away from breastfeeding on formula companies who aggressively target the 17 million babies born each year in China. Samuel Dennis, a blogger and local politician in New Zealand says:

Does the West still matter for Africa?

First on Zimbabwe, now on Darfur, Western countries have lost out at the U.N. Security Council to African states backed by China and Russia.

A Western attempt to get sanctions imposed on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government flopped on July 11. Three weeks later, when it came to renewing the mandate of peacekeepers in Darfur, Western countries bowed to demands to include wording that made clear the council would be ready to freeze any International Criminal Court indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for genocide. The United States abstained, but that made no difference to the vote.

The question had long come up in Western countries as to how much Africa mattered to them given what often seemed intractable wars, famine, disease and poverty. From an African perspective, Western countries – often former colonial powers – have sometimes been accused of arrogance, meddling and ignorance of the continent’s realities.

But while Africa’s economies were once dependent on aid and finance from the West, it is China and other Asian countries that are now rushing to invest, helping to drive unprecedented growth. How Africa will deal with the new investment was a key topic at this week’s meeting in Mauritania with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. G8 countries, meanwhile, appear to be falling short on their promises of aid.

Enter the new farmers

What’s with farming these days? The humble, even if slightly romantic vocation, is attracting a new breed of participants as investing in farmland and agriculture becomes the latest fad in the world of investments.   With financial markets in tumoil and commodity prices at record highs, traditional financial players such as investment banks and hedge funds, and even sovereign wealth funds of cash-rich emerging economies are increasingly looking at farm land as the next major investment avenue.

The motivations are varied — from pure financial punting to concerns about food security. Underlying all this is the belief that the rapid economic expansion of China and India could add more than a billion people between them to the ranks of consumers of meat and wheat-based products. And then there is the growing demand for land to grow crops for biofuels.

Morgan Stanley has bought some 40,000 hectares of land in Ukraine , while the New York Times reported this month that Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil.

Chinese firms are said to be locking up farmland and mineral reserves in Africa, while Saudi Arabia and Bahrain plan to grow strategic grains abroad to protect their countries from crises in world food supply.

According to Asia Times, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Gillani during a visit to Saudi Arabia in early June sought $6 billion in financial and oil aid in return for hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, which could be tilled by the Saudis.   All this could present some poor countries with both opportunities and threats. With oil prices at near record highs, they could trade their energy security with the food security needs of their investors and bring millions of acres of non-arable land into use. But contract farming could just as easily boomerang if high prices and domestic food shortages create a backlash against such barter deals.

Trying to deconstruct Chinese oil policy

China’s surprise decision late on Thursday to slash subsidies on fuel prices has been welcomed as a sign that Beijing is intent on reducing the pace of oil demand growth in the world’s second biggest energy consumer.

That, in theory, should help contain the upward spiral in world oil prices that took crude to a high of nearly $140 a barrel last week. Nine out of 10 analysts polled by Reuters immediately after the news took that line. But there is a contrarian view.

Previously unprofitable refining companies, obliged to sell at prices set by the state, will now be turning enough profit to fully meet transport fuel demand for the first time in weeks. Rationing and queues will be alleviated. Chinese refiners would then need to buy more crude, not less, from world crude markets.

The timing of the decision was a surprise. While other Asian countries had been easing subsidies, Beijing wasn’t expected to move until after the Olympics was safely out of the way, for fear higher prices might cause unrest.

The early decision may demonstrate Beijing’s confidence that it has social cohesion under control — a result of the positive reaction across the country to the government’s handling of the Sichuan earthquake and the Chinese perception of bias in Western media coverage of unrest in Tibet and the run-up to the Olympics.

The timing of the price increase also shows that Beijing is prepared to engage with other world powers on the global inflationary pressures that are threatening to slow Chinese economic growth.

Major oil producing and consuming countries are meeting in Saudi Arabia this weekend to discuss ways to reverse the rise of crude prices — China’s action on fuel prices ahead of the meeting permits Beijing to claim a leadership role in helping control oil prices.