Milk (On Not Buying Multi-National)

Recently I was buying milk at a local general store. These stores, called kiraanas, sell most staple foods and essentials goods, things like milk, rice, soap, and bottled water. Kiraanas are not super streamlined or efficient. Sometimes they’re sold out of what you want or they’ve run out of change. Kiraana owners can be studied in the art of ignoring you. But generally they’re wonderful.

When I ask for milk I’m usually given a cardboard carton of milk from one of India’s big dairy companies, like Amul and Mother Dairy. But on this particular day, in this particular kiraana, the only milk available is made by Nestle. It’s about 12 rupees more expensive than the milk that I usually buy and tastes exactly the same. The only way Nestle out-competes the other brand is in it’s packaging.¹

This purchase jarred my curiosity. I buy products from multi-national companies (MNCs) almost every day, but for some reason, after this particular purchase, I started wondering about how and why Nestle was selling milk in India so far from its “home” in Europe and whether I really ought to be buying it.

 These thoughts were triggered for a couple of reasons. I was dimly aware that Nestle has been accused of some dirty deeds. But the bigger reason is harder to explain. It’s something like the familiar feeling (for Americans) of watching the local general store/hardware store/coffee shop get wiped out by Walmart/Home Depot/Dunkin’ Donuts. Right then, having paid for my milk, it struck me as somehow wrong that Nestle was coming into industries—like milk, yoghurt, and sweets—that already had thriving production and distribution networks in India. In a dim, half conscious, David-and-Goliath, Jets vs Patriots sort of way, it seemed unfair for Nestle, the world’s largest food company, to enter and maybe take over an Indian market which seemed to be doing a decent job on its own.

I’ll admit it: this perspective is not very smart or sophisticated. It isn’t based on economic arguments. My aversion to the rapid globalization promoted by companies like Nestle, McDonalds, Nike, Walmart and so on, is based on something more like (but not exactly) emotion.² It can’t be proved by numbers. There’s really no theoretical basis either. It’s more like a deep feeling that globalization, the expansion of big businesses, and the increasing uniformity of goods and services available somehow threatens the uniqueness of places, the real richness of the world.

So maybe I shouldn’t have bought Nestle’s milk. Maybe I made the wrong choice. But then I remembered that it wasn’t really a choice at all, the Nestle milk was all there was in that shop. And now that I thought about it, it occurred to me that many of the products I consume—both in India and the USA—are made by the same enormous, multi-national companies. How much choice do I really have? Could I stop consuming MNC’s products, even if I wanted to? Suddenly an idea clicked. What if I did try to stop? Could I go for a long time, say a month, without buying anything at all from a multi-national company?

I decided that I would try. For one month I would try my best to not knowingly purchase any product made by a MNC. If I was in doubt, I’d research the product’s origins. If I could find a replacement product made by an Indian company, I’d buy that. Otherwise I’d have to go without.

This project is especially interesting for me because of my personal context, in India. The debate over the organization of economies, between national and global priorities, is ongoing (just thinking about how often we hear politicians and pundits talking about the “American” “Indian” or “Chinese” economies as distinct entities.) But in India this debate is particularly pressing. Multi-national corporations are increasingly active and powerful in India.³ They hire a lot of people and sell a lot of goods. They’re creating new markets and replacing old ones. They’re also trying to become more involved in how the most basic goods are delivered to consumers.⁴

My context is India specific, but these processes are global. If you’re reading this, you’re probably experiencing the same historical-economic trend: bigger and bigger companies are selling you more and more of the goods you use, and you don’t really have too much say in that. Sometimes it’s awesome. Sometimes it sucks.

I want to explore this process. One way to do so would be to read and research about the role of MNC’s in India and around the world.⁵ Or I could attempt to do fieldwork to figure out what was happening to the lives of different kinds of people. But honestly, my goal is much smaller than that.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don’t even understand how these forces effect me personally. I know that MNCs like Nestle make me uncomfortable, but I don’t fully understand why, or even how important those companies are to my daily life. So my project then is not to understand the political economy of globalization, but to begin to imagine the ways in which this process has structured my life, the places in which the massive forces of economics and politics brush against me.

 So I’m starting the experiment: for one month we (Sumita Mitra is joining me) won’t buy any products sold by multi-national corporations. In the process I hope to learn something about the way that those corporations and my own consumption habits work. After just a few days of the experiment, I’ve already realized that this is going to be a lot more complicated than it initially seemed. My vow was easy to declare, but it’s hard to actually identify what goods are multi-national. How many such things even exist in today’s world? The seemingly simple distinction between national and globalized is trickier than it seemed, and even the idea of “consumption” is difficult to pin down.

After just a few days this experiment has already provided me with food for thought. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d have anything to write about, and I already I’m overwhelmed by potential material. Sumita will be blogging too and I hope that you’ll check out our updates and maybe think about how multi-national companies are effecting you life too.

 

 

 

 

1 This, I suppose, is meant to make up for the price difference by convincing you that this is not just better milk but actually “A+ Milk.” The back of the package is rich with the kind of meaningless text that we’re used to on food products in the US. “Good makes Good” it declares, “Over 140 years of dairy experience.” There’s actually an illustrated chain of goodness, starting with “good cows” who get milked “good farmers.” The milk is then processed by “quality experts” using “61 stringent quality checks.” The last link in the chain is a glowing, grinning mom-daughter pair. The message is the same that advertisers have been flogging to death for as long as there’s been advertising: good moms spend more money to get the best for their kids.

2 Many free-marketers and some hard-line Marxists would argue that both ethically and economically speaking multi-national companies are actually no worse than smaller, non-multi-national companies they compete with and often replace (especially when you’re talking about relatively big players like Amul or Mother Dairy). It’s possible to argue that that feeling you get when you see a much loved small business get trampled by a bigger competitor is really just impossible nostalgia, or provincialism, or small-mindedness. The workings of capital/development can supposedly stripped down beyond the point of emotion. Some capitalists might say that it’s possible for a small businessman to be more exploitative than the biggest company, and less efficient to boot. Some Marxists, in turn, might see mega-enterprises as a desirable end.  But my point is that it doesn’t always pay to be rational. Sometimes we ought to accept that being nostalgic, provincial, and small minded can be important parts of our humanity.

3 Here’s a slightly more detailed version if you want it: For decades after Independence in 1947, India purposefully erected trade barriers and “encouraged” national enterprise instead of exports. The merits of this policy are debatable. As many neo-liberal economists are quick to point out many of the results were dreadful. But some sectors of the economy fared better. So, for example, in the absence of foreign investment and competition India made shitty cars but great soda. In at least a few fields, like education, state intervention paid big dividends, while in others it stifled innovation and development.

But particularly important, for my purposes, is the fact that for the years between 1947 and 1991 buying national was the only option for many goods and services. The “liberalization” of the Indian economy, which we are now living in the midst of, is essentially the restructuring of that economy. State owned firms have been privatized, export restrictions have been eased and tariffs have come down. More foreign firms have started doing business in India. This process has been perceived in many different ways; it is described variously as reform, miracle, massacre.

I don’t want to get too heavily into the process of liberalization here (partly, I admit, because I don’t fully understand the economics of it). It has been a very, very complicated process, and like most such economic-historical-social processes the outcomes won’t be clear for years (if they ever are). In general though, I would make the following observations: liberalization led to enormous economic growth, but this has not been problem free. For one thing, the benefits have been distributed very unequally. Some people have been able to acquire huge amounts of wealth by fair means and (very often) foul, while millions and millions of poor people have not benefited much at all, or have only benefited very slowly. There have been winners and losers. The prizes have been awesome, the penalties for loss are often brutal. And, when we talk about liberalization, I think we tend to more often talk about the winners than the losers. This is dangerous.

But most importantly for my purposes, the availability of stuff in India has changed dramatically. Once upon a time Indian consumers of milk, shoes, consumer electronics, cars, and lots of other things were much more limited in their choices, to goods made in India by Indian firms. That system has been dismantled and replaced by the current one, and today a vast profusion of foreign consumer goods are available in India, as they are in much of the world.

 

4 India is currently in the middle of a nationwide debate over whether or not it should allow foreign direct investment (or FDI) in the retail sector. Big foreign retailers (like Walmart) are currently very limited in their ability to invest in opening stores in India. Some economists and policy makers think that allowing these big retailers to come in will lower prices, eliminate wasteful middlemen and boost the wages that farmers make (a huge issue in India). Other economists and policy makers argue that it will actually increase unemployment by destroying small retailers and will not meaningfully rise the incomes of farmers. I’m not an economist, but I did live through the rise of big retail in the US and I haven’t been drinking the neo-liberal Kool-Aid too much. My prediction? Just like everything else, FDI in retail will create big losers and big winners. I think that the losers will far outnumber the winners, but that the powerful classes of India will overwhelmingly be among the latter.

 

5 A few problems with this: first of all the sheer amount of material, much of which comes to different conclusions based on the same evidence. Secondly, despite their claims to objectivity, economists always have an axe to grind. It has become pretty much received wisdom that liberalization is good for India’s economy. But have policy makers put these free market reforms into place because economists vouch for them, or do economists vouch for free market reforms so that policy makers will institute them? Again, don’t get me wrong. In India’s case globalization is far more complicated than being either good or bad for India. But there are lots of people out there who want you to believe that it is only, unproblematically, unequivocally good. They’re either liars or idiots.