There are products that we use in everyday life for which we don’t even begin to think about how they were made. No one asks if the people who made their clothes were paid for their work. No one asks how many acres of forest were deforested for their food. Many corporations do these things, but one company trumps them all when it comes to being horrible. People use and eat their products everyday, and no one raises a fuss. So, who is this horrible company? It is Nestlé.

Nestlé has their fingers in many pies across the globe. They own companies such as Purina Pet Food, Wonka, DiGiorno, Gerber, KitKat, Poland Spring, Stouffers and Tollhouse. One might forgive their human rights violations given the fact that they own 8,000 companies, it must be difficult to make sure all their companies tread the straight and narrow. Human right violations are despicable, however, and Nestlé deserves no forgiveness.

The first reason to disregard Nestlé as a horrible company comes from the 70’s. The company predatorily marketed their baby formula as a safe alternative to breastfeeding in countries with high poverty and low literacy rates. This meant that mothers could be tricked into believing that this formula was safe for their babies. It was, but only when the water was sanitized. The sanitization instructions were written in a different language than the description of the product written on the side. This caused many children to die from poor sanitation. This isn’t the worst of it, however. Nestlé provided their formula free of cost to hospitals so new mothers could start their children on the product. Once they left the hospital, however, the mother’s natural breastfeeding cycle had been disturbed, so the family would be forced to buy Nestlé’s alternative.

Another controversy that Nestlé is constantly fighting is one that we see here at our own school. Nestlé is one of the biggest water bottling companies in the world, but bottling water means taking water from somewhere else. So, where is Nestlé getting their water from? Well, the answer is National Parks and public aquifers. In San Bernardino National Park, Nestlé has been draining water for years with a permit that expired in 1988. No one knows for sure how much water Nestlé has drained from the region as they aren’t required to disclose this, but it is estimated to be around one billion gallons a year. Put perhaps what is more despicable is Nestlé’s PureLife brand and where they source their water. Poor communities in Pakistan have had their water levels severely decreased due to PureLife draining water from areas upstream, like in the village of Bhati Dilwan, where villagers have watched their water levels decrease by hundreds of feet, and the villagers have also been forced to drink the left over water which now has a foul smelling odor to it. That’s right, the water that is provided to students at HHS is stolen from poor communities in Pakistan who no longer have water.

If predatory marketing and stealing water weren’t bad enough, Nestlé also has been caught with child labor in its supply chain. In the nation of the Ivory Coast, Nestlé has been well known for its use of child slavery and trafficking for their massive chocolate industry. In 2005, a court case was raised by three Mailian boys who had escaped one of the farms where they described that they were abducted from their homes in Mail and forced to work in the Ivory Coast. The court case was thrown out, not because there was no evidence to support the boy’s claim, but because the courts had no jurisdiction over international entities. On the other side of the globe in Thailand, Nestlé has been caught several times for using forced labor on fishing boats that provide the fish for Nestlé’s cat food brands like Fancy Feast.

Nestlé has been caught several times doing these horrible, destructive acts and they have issued various statements claiming that they are doing everything they can to help fix their problems. These statements, however, are just lies, as they have done nothing to improve the situation in any of the areas described. People need to wise up to Nestlé, and people need to ditch them and all their horrible practices.