PRESS CONFERENCE BY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN COUNT NETWORK

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE BY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN COUNT NETWORK

A Global Fact Sheet on the economic value of breastfeeding was being launched, Phoebe Jones Shellenberg of the International Women Count Network told correspondents at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon.

Ms. Shellenberg was joined by a number of women representing the Network, the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) and various international non-governmental organizations. She said that the Network's project, undertaken jointly with the Alliance, would compile findings on the economic value of human milk and of the work of breastfeeding, including the hidden costs to women in terms of time, energy and money of doing that work. It's purpose was to highlight the contribution that women worldwide were making to the economy and to society by breastfeeding, with a view to protecting and promoting breastfeeding in policies and practices.

The launch of the Fact Sheet coincides with the current session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which has been considering the sections on health and institutional mechanisms of the Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995). The section on health contained the main agreement to support breastfeeding, while the section on institutional mechanisms contained some of the main agreements to measure and value unwaged work in national statistics. The Alliance and the Network had been the leading organizations that had pressed for those agreements and continued to lead efforts for their implementation.

Selma James, Coordinator of the Network and an editor of the Fact Sheet, said that there were two points which made the Fact Sheet a contribution for all, particularly at the current session of the Women's Commission. First, it combined the value of human milk, which had been discussed and estimated before, with the value of the work that women did by breastfeeding, which had not been previously estimated. It was important for the Commission that the issue be incorporated into the breastfeeding agenda, because institutional mechanisms for measuring the unwaged work of women were being discussed at its current session. Breastfeeding was an important part of that work.

Second, she continued, it combined the work that women did by breastfeeding in the North with that in the South. Looking at them together, the Fact Sheet already indicated that there was much to learn about the importance of breastfeeding and exactly how it fit into the economy of the world, and also to the situations of women worldwide.

There had been several discoveries so far, she added. One was that the value of breastmilk in Mali had been estimated to be $1 per litre. In the United States, not only estimates but hard prices put the value of breastmilk at $80 per litre. A wide variety of valuations, not only of breastmilk but of the women who breastfed, could be seen. Further, while in the countries of the South the value of the breastmilk might be low, its actual social value to

the survival of people might be very high. In fact, it might be the only life-saver around for millions of babies.

Chris Mulford, a member of the Alliance, a co-coordinator of the project and one of the two main writers of the Fact Sheet, said that breastfeeding was the final step in the process of human reproduction. Children were designed to be nourished and nurtured by breastfeeding. So, it played a dual role in the lives of women, as mothers and in the lives of both girl and boy children. It was crucial to spell out that relationship, because breastfeeding was often perceived as only a children's issue or a nutrition issue. In truth, it was everyone's issue.

In 1998, the Alliance, which every year had a world breastfeeding week, took "breastfeeding, the best investment" as its theme for the week, she added. In the process of collecting information for that, it amassed a lot of data on different ways of valuing breastfeeding and breastmilk. In the Fact Sheet project, the Alliance was sifting through that information, as well as information on the economic impact of breastfeeding, to present that within the framework of women's unwaged work. Human milk was not a commodity. It was a foodstuff that mothers gave to their babies and young children who needed it. The giving was almost invisible, in that it took place at home or at the most private place outside the home.

Human milk was not only food, she continued. It protected the child from infections and built up the child's immune system. It was almost a medicine. Many of the facts on the value of breastfeeding that were being used in the Fact Sheet were values about the ill-health that multiplied when breastfeeding was absent. Some of the estimates of the value of milk were based on the cost of buying replacement foods. There was a huge disparity in those costs, depending on where the mother lived. A mother in a non- industrialized country might have to pay half her family income to purchase infant formula to substitute for her own milk, while a mother in a country in the North might pay 5 per cent of her income or less.

For the baby, the risks of not breastfeeding were greater in the South, she said. The burden for the mother was great as well, since she had to take care of the child, and lose time from her other unwaged or income generating work if her child was sick. When babies were not breastfed, they tended to be sick more often and more seriously.

Continuing, she said there was a move at the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is looking at its Maternity Protection Convention -- number 103, passed in 1952 -- and being revised again this year, to weaken the Convention by removing paid breaks for breastfeeding in the formal workplace, along with other maternity rights, she said. Instead, those provisions would be placed into a recommendation and, thus, made optional. The Alliance opposed that plan, because lactating women in the workplace needed more protection, not less. Also, the current ILO Convention was one of the few

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official documents that actually recognized that breastfeeding and the work of breastfeeding had economic value. To lose that recognition would be a step backward for women.

Finally, the Beijing Platform for Action called for enabling women to breastfeed by means of legal, economic, practical and emotional support, she said. The goal of the Fact Sheet project was to showcase the economic value of breastfeeding, which was strengthened when women received the support they needed.

Solveig Francis, researcher for the Network and the other main writer of the Fact Sheet, said that she had been delighted today to see that Time magazine was giving some recognition to the work of breastfeeding. It said that nursing a baby might look effortless, but it could burn up 500 calories a day -- the equivalent of running about five miles.

One of the reasons breastfeeding was not considered work, she said, was since breastmilk was a natural food, it appeared that breastfeeding came naturally. However, it did not. One of the first things a mother who wanted to breastfeed had to do was learn how to do so, which could take six to eight weeks. Women could breastfeed for two to three hours a day, and that time could be longer if the child was ill or teething. While those were figures gathered from women's own experiences, there had been no official estimates of how much time women needed to invest and set aside for breastfeeding. Those two to three hours a day had to be multiplied by the number of weeks, months and years women had to breastfeed.

In some countries, women breastfed until the child reached three or four years of age, she continued. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, for 10 per cent of the population of children 2 to 3 years of age, breastfeeding formed a considerable part of their diet. That, in turn, had to be multiplied by the number of children women had. In that regard, women in the South were having more children and investing more time in breastfeeding. Another reason why breastfeeding was not recognized as work was that it was done simultaneously with other activities, such as cooking, looking after other children and farming.

The 500 calories women burned up to produce the milk implied having to take care of oneself, or someone else having to take care of the mother to ensure that the breastmilk was supplied continuously and as needed, she added. That meant having the right food, the right amount of liquid and some rest, which was difficult to do.

One of the decisions taken in Beijing, as a means of measuring and valuing unwaged work, was to have governments carry out timely surveys and count the work women did simultaneously with other activities, she said. Those governments that would be carrying out those surveys should also count and collect information on the time women spent breastfeeding, including when

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it was simultaneous with other activities. When governments did evaluations of unwaged work, the value of breastmilk should be included and made visible in their accounts.

Manju Gardia, founder and grassroots activist with the Chattisgarh Women's Organization in India, said that breastfeeding gave the child life and, if the mother did not breastfeed, the child would die. In India, more women in the villages breastfed their children than those in the city, since more women living in the cities worked outside their homes. In many areas women were not breastfeeding, which was bad for both the child and the mother. Women needed to breastfeed their children for at least two to three years. When she worked in the village areas, she took her children with her because they wanted to be breastfed. Breastfeeding also strengthened the relationship between the mother and child.

Adelinda Diaz Uriarte, Centro de Capacitacion para las Trabajadoras del Hogar (Centre for the Empowerment of Women in Domestic Work) and founding member of the International Network of Workers in Domestic Service, said that in Latin America and the countries of the South, breastmilk was considered important for the health of the children, above all for their physical and emotional health. Breastmilk could not be substituted by any brand of packaged milk, no matter how good it was. Almost 100 per cent of the indigenous women in Latin America fed their children breastmilk. That was because breastfeeding was important for the relationship between the mother and child. Also, women did not have the resources to buy packaged milk.

The situation was more complicated for the mothers in the cities, particularly those who were domestic workers, she continued. Those women were forced to take their children, at two or three months, back to their villages and leave them with their families to look after them and come back to the city to work. Otherwise, they were forced to leave the children on some sort of patio where they had to stay, and if they managed to get 15 to 20 minutes a day in between tasks to breastfeed, then they were lucky. That issue was a central one in the development of the rights of women.

Responding to a question regarding breastfeeding and AIDS, Ms. Mulford said that the position of the Alliance was that breastfeeding was a human right for the mother -- to make an informed and supported decision on how she would feed her baby. There was some evidence that breastfeeding might transmit AIDS from the mother to the child. However, much more information on that was needed. In the meantime, there were mothers with babies who wanted to know what to do. An informed and supported choice involved information that was unbiased and that did not come from a commercial source. Supported choice meant what was practical for the mother. If she lived in a village with no safe water, it would not be practical for her to feed her baby a breastmilk substitute.

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Asked about support for new mothers with regard to breastfeeding, Ms. Mulford said that post-partem support had been a family role for centuries. Now, considering how women's lives were changing, a lot of that support was gone and women did not have that family or peer network to help them. In the United States, the health care system saw that as part of their responsibility, but it was also having a hard time coping with all that it was supposed to do.

Ms. Francis added that because breastfeeding was not recognized as work and considered a natural process, one of the things that was often missing was the aspect of education and support. If it was recognized and counted as work, then women would be in a stronger position to ask for support and for it to be more institutionalized in hospitals and health services.

Ms. Mulford mentioned the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, which was a global initiative to improve conditions for childbearing women in the birthplace and beyond. One of the 10 steps that it recommended was referral to a peer support network, because one kind of work that a women who was breastfeeding could do was to support another breastfeeding woman.

Responding to a question regarding women in waged work in relation to breastfeeding, Ms. Mulford said that the ILO Convention called for paid maternity benefits for women in waged work, including maternity leave and paid breastfeeding breaks in the formal workplace. However, women who worked in the informal sector had no protection.

Asked whether any research had been done on the attitudes and training of nurses regarding breastfeeding, Ms. Mulford replied that another issue covered in the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative was that, after a hospital established a breastfeeding policy, it had to train its staff in carrying out that policy. That meant not only the nurses, but others, such as the cleaners and the people who answered the telephones. Everyone should understand the value of breastfeeding and be able to say the supportive things that mothers needed to hear.

In response to a question on ways to counter arguments for not allowing space for women to breastfeed in the workplace, she said it was a question of political will. There were places in the United States which said that they were too poor to set aside rooms for breastfeeding. The employer stood to benefit from having women who breastfed, because if those women had sick children at home, they would not work as well and would miss more work. If they left work to attend to sick children at home, then there was also the cost of training someone else to do the job.

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