Perhaps without delving too deeply into the matter, a shift in perspective regarding the commitments made by international organizations is quietly taking hold in our reality. Recently, the International Labour Organization (ILO), together with Nestlé, launched a two-year project to promote fair recruitment and labor rights in coffee supply chains in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. This is not the first time this organization has entered into some controversial alliances.
Indeed, Nestlé and the ILO are expanding their long-standing collaboration by launching a new two-year project, “From Fair Recruitment to Worker Protection in Coffee Supply Chains,” focused on promoting labor rights in the coffee supply chains of three key sourcing countries: Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
Building on its normative function and convening power, the ILO will facilitate social dialogue among governments, employers’ and workers’ organizations to identify and address the main factors generating decent work deficits and labor risks in coffee supply chains. Based on this analysis, the project will implement targeted country-level interventions to promote fair recruitment practices and respect for labor rights. Country-level interventions will also support global knowledge sharing in the coffee sector.
Dan Rees, Director of the ILO’s Priority Action Programme for Decent Work Outcomes in Supply Chains, stated: “Coffee production sustains the livelihoods of approximately 20 to 25 million families worldwide, generating essential income and employment. However, decent work deficits persist in coffee supply chains, particularly among temporary and migrant workers. Through this project, we seek to advance labor rights, promote decent work, and contribute to more sustainable supply chains.”
Antje Shaw, Head of Sustainability for Coffee at Nestlé, said: “Our alliance with the ILO represents an important step in advancing and promoting human rights in coffee supply chains. By working together, we can progress more quickly towards creating more resilient and inclusive coffee supply chains where workers are treated with dignity.”
The project is supported by the Nescafé Plan, Nestlé’s global sustainability program for the brand, and will contribute to the ILO’s Fair Recruitment Initiative, which supports the promotion and implementation of fair recruitment principles worldwide, as well as to the ILO’s flagship programme Safety + Health for All, particularly its Vision Zero Fund, which promotes the fundamental right to a safe and healthy working environment in supply chains.
Nestlé is a founding member of the Child Labour Platform (CLP) convened by the ILO and a partner in projects aimed at promoting decent work in agricultural supply chains.
The dark side of the coin
Perhaps few companies symbolize the controversial immorality of global capitalism better than Nestlé. The Swiss multinational, founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, was born with the idea of creating a formula for babies who could not be breastfed.
More than a century and a half later, it has become a food giant that sells water, childhood, and health as if they were private property, leaving behind an endless trail of abuse, disease, and polluted rivers. Therefore, the history of the Swiss multinational is marked by several historical and ethical controversies. As early as the 1970s, Nestlé was accused of aggressively promoting infant formula in developing countries, leading to a massive boycott because the use of contaminated water and lack of breastfeeding caused infant deaths, making it one of the biggest health scandals of the 20th century.
Through an aggressive advertising campaign, it convinced millions of poor mothers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that its powdered milk was “healthier” than breast milk. To achieve this, it hired saleswomen dressed as nurses who offered free samples of the product to illiterate women or those without access to medical information. The doses were calculated to last just until the mothers stopped producing their own milk.
From then on, they depended on Nestlé’s powder… and the contaminated water they had to use to mix it. Thousands of babies died from infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition. We recall that doctors and journalists called that formula “the baby killer.”
This led to the World Health Organization (WHO) approving the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes in 1981, condemning the company’s practices. But the damage was already done. Decades later, Nestlé continues to use similar tactics in countries with weak legislation, where it bribes health professionals and presents itself as an ally of child health while promoting dependency on its product.
Nestlé has turned water—the most basic common good—into a commodity. The company is frequently cited for privatizing water sources in areas with scarcity and for being one of the world’s largest plastic polluters. Under brands like Pure Life or Perrier, the company extracts millions of liters from public aquifers to bottle in plastic and sell at a premium.
In Pakistan, it diverted entire springs, leaving entire communities drinking impure water.
In Nigeria, South Africa, and Mexico, the pattern repeats: Nestlé settles in impoverished areas, pays a pittance for the resource, and sells it back to the same populations who previously used it for free. The argument remains the same and is consistent with neoliberal capitalism: “efficiency and sustainability.”
But the reality is that the company has been identified as one of the biggest contributors to plastic found in oceans and beaches around the planet, according to annual reports from Break Free From Plastic, and its promise to replace single-use packaging with recyclable materials has advanced barely 1% in a decade.
Added to this is the horror in the cocoa production chain. We believe this is the core of the controversy. For more than twenty years, Nestlé has been accused of using child and forced labor on plantations in West Africa.
In 2001, it committed to eradicating it “within five years.” Twenty-six years later, it continues to buy cocoa from farms where children work with machetes, carry 40-kilo sacks, and sleep in huts without water or electricity. The company argues that they are “children of family farmers.” An argument that conceals an uncomfortable truth: if farmers were paid a fair price, they would not need child labor to survive.
The empire of impunity
As we have seen, Nestlé’s track record is that it not only poisons water or exploits children. It also fakes labels, manipulates prices, and buys legislation. In Canada and Germany, it was accused of price-fixing chocolate with Mars and Hershey. It paid millions in settlements but without admitting guilt. In Colombia, police seized more than 300 tons of powdered milk with falsified dates and brands. In India, its famous Maggi noodles contained lead levels far above the legal limit.
Faced with this accumulation of accusations, Nestlé does not really defend itself; it simply reframes the narrative and presents itself as a “company committed to nutrition and sustainability.” We recall that in 2002, it went so far as to demand that Ethiopia pay a $6 million debt in the midst of a famine; after an international wave of protests, it partially relented and “donated” part of the money to humanitarian organizations operating in the same country.
So one might ask why this alliance between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Nestlé arises. It is based on the ILO’s strategy of partnering with the private sector to improve labor conditions directly in global supply chains. Despite the criticism and the “bad reputation” that Nestlé has accumulated due to the historical controversies detailed above, the ILO justifies these agreements.
It is true that Nestlé is one of the world’s largest buyers of coffee and cocoa. In this sense, the ILO believes that collaborating with a “giant” makes it possible to implement decent work standards that affect thousands of small producers in countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Many of these agreements focus specifically on eliminating child labor and improving safety in the fields—areas where Nestlé has been strongly questioned and where the ILO has the technical mandate to intervene.
However, these alliances often generate rejection from unions and social organizations, who argue that multinationals use the ILO’s image to engage in “social washing” without deeply changing their extractive business practices. In reality, nothing changes because there is no punishment, and where there is no punishment, there is impunity.
In the same way, they maintain production methods from the Middle Ages in agricultural tasks, which generate the conditions for child labor to be incorporated. Any attempt to eradicate child labor or improve labor conditions within the frameworks of capitalist society is doomed to failure.
Thus, these issues on the international stage become a matter of good form, typical of committed and progressive citizens: it is well-regarded to talk about child labor, ecology, sustainable development, integrated rural development, endogenous local development, sustainable growth, etc. Of course, without thinking that these concepts contain within themselves an insurmountable contradiction with the immanent essence of the capitalist mode of production, where only profitability matters.
*Article originally published in Sur y Sur on April 8, 2026.
Uruguayan journalist resident in Geneva, former member of the United Nations Press Correspondents Association in Geneva, analyst Associated with the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE)