I think we all have our favorite brands of chocolate, candies, sodas, and many other food products. Often we have consumed them since we were a child and the taste of them just brings happy memories. So it’s not too surprising that we will keep buying them as adults. This is something that can be called loyalty to a certain brand that we keep purchasing over a longer period. It’s a product we recognize and prefer among all the other competitors. But sometimes it happens that we don’t know the background of it. We didn’t know the whole story or the past of the company that we chose to support.

If you asked me 10 or 20 years ago that chocolate would be connected with child or forced labor I would be shocked. So even buying a thing as innocent as a bar of chocolate can have enormous consequences for other communities and other lives. Maybe it’s time that we get into the information that is sometimes not really available on the first page of a Google search. We should all start to question things that are told to us in expensive marketing campaigns. It’s like every company in the world to have a pristine public image. To try to sell us the idea that they always think first of the consumer’s needs instead of their own profits. But we are not small children anymore. And maybe it’s hard to give up on things that bring us comfort. However, we as consumers need to decide what we want to support when we buy certain products. We have the freedom and the responsibility to be moral in our choices and try to fix things that greedy companies are doing to increase their profits.

The water danger

As we all very well know water is the number one thing all humans need to survive. And that’s exactly why the water business can be very lucrative if done right. Some 10 or even 15 years ago people didn’t think twice about buying bottled water. You didn’t have as many people as now who are environmentally concerned and carrying more sustainable refillable water bottles. Back then it was all about buying natural spring water coming from pristine water sources somewhere up in the hills or green mountain peaks. Was it lucrative? Yes very much so. And it is no surprise that the Nestle Group wanted a piece of the action.

Nestlé has been repeatedly sued over its aggressive acquisition of private water reserves and the alarming amounts of water it sucks out of Michigan’s ground. The multinational has been under fire in Michigan since 2003 when a judge ordered Nestlé to stop its operations due to ecological harm and a massive reduction in water levels from its operations. Nestlé Waters CEO Tim Brown said that if he could bottle more of drought-stricken California’s water for profit, he would.

Allowing companies like Nestlé to do whatever they want comes hand in hand with undermining the public water system we rely on. Water problems across the state are due to corruption, self-interest, and putting the public’s interest last. And we’ve had enough

In 2015, a Desert Sun investigation revealed that Nestlé was piping spring water from the San Bernadino National Forest to sell as Arrowhead brand bottled water. The newspaper found the company was using a permit with an expiration date in 1988, a permit the Forest Service hadn’t reviewed in many years. The water was free to the company for years, while California went through drought after drought. Today, a new company owns Arrowhead, and the water is still free.

In Pakistan, in 2003 it was revealed that Nestle was diverting clean drinking water from villages and towns and then packaging it in their factories. They would then resell that water back to the same people they took it from. The people in these towns were forced to drink dirty polluted water because they couldn’t afford to buy the bottled water that was actually theirs to begin with.

The chocolate controversy

Three million tons of chocolate is eaten every year. Have you ever wondered where those cocoa crops come from? Well, a good chunk of it is grown in Africa including the ones used by Nestle which can involve a lot of child slavery and forced labor. Chocolate is one of the products Nestle is most famous for. And cocoa is expensive. You have to bring it all the way from Africa which is already eating into the profits. So it’s no surprise that they started buying cocoa from farms that use forced child labor to harvest the beans.

And it was all going according to plan until the year 2000 when a report came out that Nestle, Cadbury, and Mars were all guilty of buying blood cocoa. Nestle promised to free its chocolate candy from slave labor by 2005 and missed that deadline. And all the deadlines after that.

The world’s chocolate companies missed deadlines to uproot child labor from their cocoa supply chains in 2005, 2008, and 2010. Next year, they face another target date and, industry officials indicate, they probably will miss that, too. As a result, the odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the United States is the product of child labor.

About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West Africa where, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report, more than 2 million children were engaged in dangerous labor in cocoa-growing regions. When asked this spring, representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands — Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé — could not guarantee that any of their chocolates were produced without child labor.

“I’m not going to make those claims,” an executive at one of the large chocolate companies said. With the growth of the global economy, Americans have become accustomed to reports of worker and environmental exploitation in faraway places. But in few industries, experts say, is the evidence of objectionable practices so clear, the industry’s pledges to reform so ambitious, and the breaching of those promises so obvious.

So far what is seen by the public Nestle has managed to create only one chocolate product that is made entirely from cocoa that is sourced from different sources. And they proudly presented it to the public strengthening their marketing campaigns about it. But at the same time, they keep using blood cocoa in all other chocolate products hoping that the greater public will simply forget about this issue.

The Ethiopia famine

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world. And in 2002 they were in the middle of one of the worst famines in history. In 1986 Nestle bought a German company based in Ethiopia that had been nationalized in the 70s. The Ethiopian government owed Nestle money and offered to pay 1.5 million dollars as compensation. But by 2002 due to the new exchange rate, this amount had become 6 million dollars.

There were millions of people starving in Ethiopia and 6 million dollars could have gone a long way. It could provide safe drinking water for 1.5 million families, or anti-diarrhea medicine for 750,000 kids. But instead of writing this debt off Nestle demanded their money back.

In the interest of continued flows of foreign direct investment which is critical for developing countries, it is highly desirable that conflicts are resolved according to international law and in a spirit of fairness, a spokesman for the company said.

Ethiopia’s Prime minister Meles Zenawi said that 6 million people in his country needed emergency food aid and that the number could rise to 15 million within months.

The famine, brought on by the failure of rains for the third year in a row has been intensified by a collapse in the price of coffee which supports a quarter of the country’s population. Nestle, the world’s largest coffee processor, made $5.5bn in profits last year.

Ethiopia has the lowest income per head in the world, with the average person surviving on $100 a year. More than a tenth of its children die before their first birthday.

Aid agencies are worried that the crisis could be even worse than the 1984 disaster in which a million people died. Drought is threatening many farmers with the prospect of famine, Nestle, by contrast, continues to thrive. The company does not need $6m. It is a highly profitable company that could easily live up to its commitment to ‘help fight hunger in developing countries’ by writing off this claim. By trying to get the money back from Ethiopia Nestle committed what would have been known as the greatest public relations blunder of the decade. They have eventually backed down due to the mounting pressure of boycotts but the damage to their reputation have been done.

So what is going to be done next by this international conglomerate? It is easy to see that they move from country to country trying to make extra profit and not bearing any responsibility for the disasters and consequences they create for the people and communities who live there. I believe that this is far from the dream Henri Nestle had about this company when he founded it. And it would be the most honest thing that Nestle could do is to stop using the name of the man who invented a product to save lives. Henri Nestle invented baby formula milk to save children. What that company is doing today is destroying lives and the environment just to make more money.