Brazzil

{mosimage}You can see the three powers in the city of Brasília from the air. Brazil's capital, constructed on the Planalto in 1,000 days in the 1950s to fulfill the electoral promise of Juscelino Kubitschek, is laid out like a bird.

Accommodation is in low-rise blocks along the wings, with the government along the body, the ministries like horizontal dominoes either side of a wide dual carriageway leading to the head of the bird laying in Lake Paranoá.

There the executive, legislative and judiciary have their palaces and chambers, sculpted in concrete, some appearing to float on the placid lakes that surround them.

I arrived at my hotel as the Sem Terra were marching down one side of the dual carriageway.

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - the landless workers movement - had gathered in Goiânia, the capital of Goiás, and 12,000 had marched for 16 days to reach Brasília, camping overnight in 12 great circus tents.

The demands they presented to President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva included support for an inquiry into Brazil's internal and foreign debt, the banning of the sales of weapons in Brazil and, most importantly, honouring an election commitment to provide land to 400,000 families.

78,000 families had benefited from the scheme introduced by the government and the government responded to the march by saying the pace would pick up and 120,000 families will be settled by the end of the year.

Calling politicians to account was in the news on other fronts. The Brazilian media revels in its freedom since the end of the dictatorship in 1985 and sees exposing corruption as a central role.

The leading news weekly, Veja, exposed a senior manager in the postal service apparently accepting a bribe to win contracts from undercover reporters, after explaining how the system operates.

The manager, like 20,000 other posts in the government machinery and para-statals, had been nominated by one of the political parties in the governing coalition.

Video recordings of the sting appeared on the Sunday news and during the week I was in Brazil the leading politician implicated in the scandal stood up in the chamber to dispute the allegations as government leaders swung into action to stop a panel of enquiry being formed by Federal Deputies and Senators.

Efforts to stop the enquiry failed, perhaps inevitably given the widespread public and media support for it to go ahead, prompting one columnist to contend that the government's real strategy was to test the loyalty of party members and allies as they begin to plan for elections in 2006.

This reminded me of the loyalty test our own Labour Party ran when pushing through planned Tory cuts to benefits to single mothers in the early days of their first Parliament.

With these high profile events unfolding I had come to Brasília to praise Brazil for the example it sets to the world in protecting infant health.

This was in my role as Campaigns and Networking Coordinator at Baby Milk Action, still the day job as I work a notional 2 days per week, telecommuting from Brazil.

Brazil was hosting the II International Milk Bank Conference, and its own IV National Milk Bank Conference.

Brazil is the world leader in human milk banking. The Federal District of Brasília alone contains 14 milk banks, as many as the whole of Great Britain.

The bulk of donated and pasteurized milk is used for premature infants whose own mothers may be in the process of establishing lactation. Survival rates are far higher than for infants fed with artificial milks.

In the UK it takes dedicated staff raising money through raffles and fetes to establish a new milk bank, whereas in Brazil it is government policy to expand the network beyond the present 185 and to share the results of its research and technological development.

At the conference, a pact was signed by the Minister of Health with representatives from Latin American countries to this end.

Brazil is also an example to the world in controlling the aggressive marketing by baby food companies, successively strengthening legislation implementing marketing requirements adopted by the World Health Assembly since 1981.

I joined partners from the International Baby Food Action Network from Brazil, Costa Rica and Guatemala on a panel explaining the marketing requirements and how they are being implemented. As well as praising the strong efforts made by these countries, I had come to warn against complacency.

Companies have been prosecuted or otherwise held to account by enforcement authorities in these Latin American countries.

In Brazil breastfeeding rates, which declined through decades of aggressive marketing, have been recovering significantly over the past 10 years, which is helping to reduce infant mortality and morbidity.

Where my wife Sonia worked in São José dos Campos, it was a rare event if a mother left the municipal hospital not breastfeeding after her three-day stay. With support virtually all mothers are able to do so.

Breastfeeding rates at 4 months in São José are now amongst the highest in São Paulo state and infant mortality rates are now about 12 deaths per 1,000 live births, comparing to 6 in the UK.

When we saw formula promotions in the supermarkets a quick call to the health inspectorate or consumer protection agency would see them stopped the same or next day.

So, for Brazilian politicians and health workers the aggressive marketing seen in countries without strong legislation is largely unknown.

My message at the Conference was that this is not because the companies are ethical, as they claim, but because of the legislation.

I presented evidence from IBFAN's monitoring report Breaking the Rules, Stretching the Rule 2004 which shows, with examples of the companies' own materials, the misleading and idealizing messages they use to convince mothers that artificial feeding is the same as or better than breastfeeding and the other aggressive techniques they use to try to increase sales of their products.

Vigilance is required as even when countries have introduced legislation, the companies do not tire from trying to undermine it.

IBFAN campaigning had helped to oppose just such an attack on Brazil's exemplary legislation in 2004.

India, another country with a strong law, saw Nestlé taking the government to court in an attempt to have the law struck down, after the company was itself taken to court for failing to put required information on labels of infant formula in the correct language.

Case studies from seven countries provided an overview of those that had succeeded in regulating marketing and others that had bowed to industry pressure and introduced only voluntary codes, which are incapable of stopping malpractice.

IBFAN is an unusual network. It has no headquarters and does not set up groups but links organizations working to monitor the baby food industry against WHA standards.

As I was speaking in Brasília, IBFAN members from every continent were at the Assembly taking place in Geneva to raise awareness of the latest concerns over marketing strategies (e.g. increased use of idealizing health claims) and scientific findings (e.g. the worryingly high rate of contamination of powdered infant formula with Enterobacter Sakazakii, which has been linked to deaths in Europe and elsewhere).

IBFAN's strength comes from knowing what the companies are really doing on the ground in the over 100 countries where there are members of the network.

Groups strategize and act in concert to achieve controls that are helping to save lives and protect a mother's right to receive independent and correct information.

It is a model from which other campaigns, such as that for Simultaneous Policy, can usefully learn.

Mike Brady is Campaigns and Networking Coordinator at Baby Milk Action (www.babymilkaction.org), the UK member of the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN - http://www.ibfan.org/), through which he met his wife, Sonia, pediatrician and Carioca (from Rio de Janeiro).  Mike and Sonia split their time between Cambridge in the UK and São José dos Campos in Brazil.

In his spare time, Mike is the Local Group Network Coordinator for the UK member of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (Simpol-UK - www.simpol.org.uk  ISPO - www.simpol.org), which links global justice campaigners around the world to discuss, develop and campaign for policies to make a fairer and sustainable world.

Contact mikebrady@babymilkaction.org and see his blog at http://mikebradybrazil.blogspot.com

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