Junk food sellers are increasingly targeting poor countries as "emerging markets" to please Wall Street and shareholders. The marketing is especially unethical since obese people are more likely to get and give COVID-19.
In Brazil, food giant Nestle sends vendors door to door hawking its high-calorie junk food and giving customers a full month to pay for their purchases. Such a deal. Nestle calls the junk food hawkers, who are themselves obese, "micro-entrepreneurs." Right.
Supplanting the indigenous diets of people in poor countries with fast food, packaged goods and soft drinks is unethical for many reasons. In addition to creating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic illnesses and dental degradation, the junk food supplants subsistence agriculture crops with GMO corn and soybeans. Even philanthropic groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have drunk Big Food's Kool-Aid about GMOs "feeding the world." Actually, GMOs drench the fields of poor communities with toxic pesticides and pollute their waters.
Nestle's exploitation of the poor goes back more than 40 years when it convinced poor mothers to reject their own breast milk--the one thing poor mothers actually have to give their babies--in favor of its infant formula.
"The single largest donor to congressional candidates was the Brazilian meat giant JBS, which gave candidates $112 million in 2014," reported the New York Times about Big Food's influence in Brazil. (JBS acquired Swift & Company, the third largest US beef and pork processor, in 2007 and slaughters an astounding 51.4 thousand head per day.) In 2014, Coca-Cola gave $6.5 million in campaign contributions in Brazil and McDonald's donated $561,000.
A few years ago, Reuters reported that the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization takes hundreds of thousands of dollars and "obesity" advice from junk food and soft drink companies. No wonder the advice stresses "exercise" and gives aggressive marketing to children a pass.
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