Mothers' milk and markets

Abstract

Breastfeeding is rarely seen as an economic issue. Many would find the idea of placing a dollar value on mothers’ milk as quite repugnant. Breastfeeding is not an economic relationship. It is a complex, physiological, emotional and social relationship between mother and child, intricately related to the nature of society, community and family she lives in. Economics is not well equipped to deal with this. Its models rely on ideas of scarcity, selfishness, price and competition between individuals to maximise human satisfaction. In the case of breastfeeding, the main factors determining resource availability and allocation are not price but altruism, dependency, and breastfeeding knowledge and skills; and the ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ of breastfeeding fall not just on individuals but on society as a whole. Yet in a world where not valuing something in dollar terms means it is not valued at all, this economic invisibility can have major consequences for the ‘market’ for mother’s milk, for infant and maternal health and well-being, and for appropriate public policy. This article provides a feminist economic analysis of breastfeeding. It is broad ranging, uses cross-disciplinary evidence and draws on a variety of frameworks including a human rights approach. It builds on a growing feminist economic literature that argues that conventional approaches to public policy rest on misleading measures and concepts of economic efficiency. It seeks to highlight the imperfections within the market for infant food, with the main ‘products’ in this market broadly comprising: mothers’ own milk (fed from the breast or expressed) or other mothers’ milk (milk banks or wet nurses); commercial baby foods including infant milks (formula) and complementary foods and juices (referred to as ‘breastmilk substitutes’). It shows that the dominant share of this market for infant food is accounted for by commercial baby foods and argues that the dominance of commercial baby food at the expense of breastmilk and breastfeeding reflects ignorance of scientific evidence on the health risks associated with consumption of formula milk; agency problems arising from the mother necessarily making decisions on behalf of the infant; a pricing structure which does not recognise or incorporate the negative externalities associated with consumption of formula milk (for example, healthrelated costs incurred by individuals and society later on in life); and the unfair competitive and marketing advantage that commercial producers of breastmilk substitutes (private companies) have over other suppliers to the market (in this case mothers). The article uses a market analysis to demonstrate that unrecognised social costs and information failures, agency problems and unequal power relationships, along with unfair