Nestle and Zimbabwe – “blood milk” and transnational production

The Swiss food giant Nestlé has announced that it will stop buying milk from a Zimbabwean dairy farm owned by Robert Mugabe’s wife, after pressure from a South African human rights group.

Nestle has been buying milk from dairy farms owned by Grace Mugabe, the president’s wife, thereby helping the hugely corrupt Mugabe family to gain wealth in the midst of the extreme poverty in Zimbabwe. The previous owners of the farms were forced off their land by Mugabe’s militias.

Although Switzerland has economic and financial sanctions in place against Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, his family, and his businesses, they don’t apply to overseas subsidiaries of Swiss companies (like Nestle in Zimbabwe).

But, since the story broke, civil society pressure has forced Nestle to rethink, and now it’s going to stop buying Mugabe’s milk.

Interesting in relevance to the declining power of states to regulate transnational companies and prevent them from dealing with corrupt regimes, and also the growing power of non-government, non-corporate actors to affect real changes within the “sovereign” economies of nation states, and in the wider global political economy.

Also note the speed at which the events developed – my guess is that official government-to-government diplomacy hardly ever works as fast as this!

You can read about it at www.telegraph.co.uk, here are the links to the story as it unfolded:

Grace Mugabe, her ‘stolen’ farm and how she supplies Zimbawean milk to Nestle food giant, 26 Sept 2009.

Grace Mugabe’s milk sales to Nestlé sparks human rights groups to call for action, 27 Sept 2009.

South African rights group launches Nestle boycott over Mugabe milk, 30 Sept 2009.

Nestlé to stop buying Grace Mugabe dairy’s milk, 2nd Oct 2009.