Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

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Recycling partially used soap is a good idea. Making sure everyone around the world has access to soap is certainly super important.

There's really no reason US recycled soap needs to be the soap that is sent to (eg) Africa, shipped over oceans. Doesn't (eg) Africa have it's own soap production facilities? But I guess American consumers would be unwilling to use recycled soap? Or just the neat connection between the soap collected in one place and delivered to those poor unfortunates overseas is what's necessary to get funding and other support? Nobody wants to fund just paying for soap in (say) Africa or just recycling soap in the US, I guess.

Causing "60%+ reduction in the number of children who die from diarrheal diseases each year" -- is a pretty stunning claim. Looking closer... I guess they're simply saying that children ding of such diseases had dropped by 60% from 1990 to 2020, not that they alone are responsible for that? Just that they've "helped" to some unknown extent? I bet most readers didn't catch that. That seems a bit dishonest actually. Still, even the 60% reduction in such deaths over 20 years alone is pretty great and I hadn't known about it! (I believe this is one of the leading causes of death in man parts of the world -- or used to be?). I suspect this particular effort had a pretty minimal contribution to those numbers.

I apologize if this just comes off as "jaded old man", but I have gotten warier as I've gotten older of the real harms of first world countries dumping all this "aid" on the third world and calling it charity. It's not hard to see how tons of free food, 2nd hand clothing, and even things like recycled soap could undercut any native producers in these third world countries, making them perpetually dependent on aid.

That dependency was a large part of Nestle's strategy in providing baby formulae in Africa. They would supply each new mother with - if I'm not mistaken - one month or three month's worth of formulae. Just enough so that she would stop lactating, but require them to now purchase many month's worth of formulae at prices that they really could not afford.

Holy shit! I didn't know about that. If true, this is pure evil. Any source for further reading?

Edit - never mind. I have just gone through 2 articles and now my blood is boiling.

FWIW there were widespread, decades-long boycotts of Nestle due to their baby formula marketing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

>>> That dependency was a large part of Nestle's strategy in providing baby formulae in Africa. They would supply each new mother with - if I'm not mistaken - one month or three month's worth of formulae. Just enough so that she would stop lactating, but require them to now purchase many month's worth of formulae at prices that they really could not afford.

> FWIW there were widespread, decades-long boycotts of Nestle due to their baby formula marketing:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

So this has been known for 50 years? I'd always assumed this was a much more recent controversy. What's the situation with Nestle's marketing now?

What imperialism and neo-colonialism controlled by european-descended cultures have done to exploit the rest of the world is so terrible that it almost sounds like science fiction, and we in the countries on the taking end mostly manage to avoid knowing about it. It is ongoing.

It's because those countries don't protect themselves from foreign predatory selling. Developed countries have all sorts of restrictions on what their own citizens can import, what can be sold locally, even what free gifts they can accept, to prevent prevent that sort of exploitation. But the common feature of poor countries is that they're bad at self-governing, so they're kind of at the mercy of everyone else. What can other people do about that? Regime change? That's been tried a lot and doesn't work.

I know this sounds cold, but blaming what foreigners do on them is kind of fruitless. There are so many of them waiting to exploit anyone. It's like blaming foreign hackers for hacking your computers or even blaming the weather for blowing down your fence. Yes, it's technically their fault, but you're never going to eliminate those outside forces so you'd better improve your own security.

Not sure why you singled out the ethnicity of the people in those foreign countries since China does it too now.

You need to realize that a lot of this is pushed on developing nations through the IMF and other organizations that force countries to sign extremely poor deals out of desperation.

How exactly do you expect a country to stop stronger countries when they have a weak government, military, social services, and treasury?

You can read a cursory of these issues here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund#Cr...

FWIW China is doing the same thing as the IMF through its belt and road initiative, that doesn't make it right either.

OK, didn't know it was the IMF's fault.

I know you already declared it "fruitless" but it's worth looking into the decades that the USA and other countries spent using all the political, economic, and military force they could to prevent these countries from protecting themselves from foreign predatory selling, it's probably part of the picture.

"Fruitless" is a funny word when you read about the USA+Dole Corporation wars on South America.

Tribal and religious wars are nothing compared to the wars waged for corporate and imperial interests.

> "Fruitless" is a funny word when you read about the USA+Dole Corporation wars on South America.

North America, mostly; specifically, Central America, which is part of North, not South, America.

You do realize that a common feature of these poor countries is non-stop meddling in their local affairs, especially by the West. If there is a politician or political group that would affect the flow of resources out of said country, then they end up having a regime change or their opposition receives a wealth of arms and/or money.

> It's because those countries don't protect themselves from foreign predatory selling.

Can't do that. You'd have the IMF and World Bank on your backs if you tried to place restrictions on trade. This is a one-way street.

Nestle used the same marketing techniques in every country. In the United States today approx. 70% of babies are fed entirely or partially using formula. If that number surprises you, then maybe that's a hint to check your privilege.

Don't forget that one of the major exports of "European cultures"--including European-educated people from elsewhere--is manufactured outrage.

Making a buck off of poor people is hardly unique to European culture.

> If that number surprises you, then maybe that's a hint to check your privilege.

Has "check your privilege" become so cliché that it's just spewed out where it doesn't make sense? I'm honestly trying to understand what kind of "privilege" leads to one being unaware of baby formula statistics.

The phrase is idiotic and I hate it, but in this case it's presumably about education level, or the ability to breastfeed a baby without having to go to work and have someone else take care of it.

It's just such a weird statistic to flex on. I'm upper middle class, and I'm honestly surprised the number is that low, because pretty much every mother I know has used baby formula at some point. It's not ever anything I associated with class or education.

>Nestle used the same marketing techniques in every country. In the United States today approx. 70% of babies are fed entirely or partially using formula.

I have 4 kids, the oldest is 7. I can assure you, there was no nefarious formula marketing going on when my wife was pregnant.

Also, there is a really bug difference between what was being described in Africa and "a baby partially on formula". There were times when we leaned on formula - and it was beneficial. There are moms who are dependent on formula and it is a good thing.

But let's not confuse those positive sides of formula from Nestlé pushing formula in Africa.

Oh no, it's certainly not unique to European culture. The rich of Europe, and of other settler-colonies set up by Europe like the USA, have just been the most successful at it for the past few hundred years, including at extracting profit from most other parts of the planet to the benefit of the European (and European-founded/dominated) parts. phenomenally successful.

Check my lactation privilege?

It shouldn't lessen your outrage that Nestle is being horrible everywhere. This is the strangest form of whataboutism I've seen.

The comment being replied to is specifically about "imperialism and neo-colonialism". How nestle acts in different countries, in that context, is not whataboutism.

Excellent podcast ep about it here:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Not just in Africa. There was a huge ad campaign in the US a few decades ago implying that Enfamil and Similac were healthier options than breast feeding. This was pushed especially hard in economically depressed areas that could least afford it.

Not altogether unlike the ad campaigns convincing folks that (free) water with a meal was vaguely wrong. "By they way," they said, "we've got some special brown water with a fukton of added sugar and CO2 for sale instead!"

> This was pushed especially hard in economically depressed areas that could least afford it.

An interesting choice for a company trying to maximize profits.

It's not hard for these companies to bribe politicians to allow welfare recipients to buy their products through snap/food stamps/ebt by getting exemptions. It's very devious and wrong.

Likely the campaign was found to be most effective against a less educated population that wants to give their children opportunity they didn't have.

Also the most logical choice given that it's a hard sell for wealthy, stay-at-home moms rather than women who need to work and don't have the necessary time to breastfeed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Also, do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to negligence.

I was about to blow the outrage horn but decided to do some reading. After going over the entire wiki, i could not find any single shred of evidence that could even suggest outright malice or worse, criminality, from nestle.

I remain open minded, but I'd like to see evidence that justifies the claims.

Currently, the accusations seem based on selective facts & theory, used to form a narrative that is questionable at best.

However, nowhere in the article did i see any mention of any of the positive effects by nestle donations.

Here are some counterfactuals: 1- most men do not realize that women may not produce milk for several days despite lactating nonstop during this time. Newborns in such cases will be inmediately be given formula before jaundice sets in. Nestle probably (unintentionally) saved countless children from death this way. 2- formula and breatsfeeding are not mutually exclusive. The notion that free formula would impair the ability of women to continue breastfeeding is not true, as many dads will attest. 3- Africa life expectancy / health outcomes are poor. In any emergency, you do want to have formula as a fallback option 4- this article presents african women as naive with zero proof.

Is there a smoking gun that i missed somewhere?

Hmm.

W1 uses 1/N of the free formula and sells the remainder to W2-N. Next month, she's still lactating AND has enough money to buy 1/N for N-1 months.

Note that the prices in this scheme are independent of Nestle's prices.

However, high Nestle prices are a big incentive for someone to be W0.

That is seriously disgusting. They're sacrificing a baby's health for profit. Do they have no limits?

I can't stop thinking about this because on surface it sounds reasonable, but there's something off about the logic.

So don't offer aid because it will stop capital investment. But there is no capital to invest because people spend their days trying to stay alive rather than obtaining capital.

So the logic is flawed. You want to promote investment in a place with nothing to invest by not investing in that place.

But furthermore, you want to do it in the name of fairness. You want to give Africa the same market opportunity that exists in America. That logic is also flawed, because there is no opportunity in Africa. So you're just letting companies with preexisting status hoarde all the opportunity.

There is a huge difference between investing in the productive capacity of a country, and dumping cheap/free goods.

If you look at countries that have successfully transitioned from 2nd/3rd world countries to 1st world economies, despite what "free market" boosters would have you think, nearly all of the started out with a huge amount of protectionism, so that domestic producers could improve their capacity without getting decimated by (initially) more advanced foreign competitors. South Korea is a great example of this, and of course China - while China is famous for its exports, China makes it notoriously difficult for foreign firms to compete in the country, often putting out the tantalizing notion of a huge market, but then stealing trade secrets and putting their thumb heavily on the scale in favor of domestic companies.

I think you would really enjoy Doing Good Better by William MacAskill.

You can offer aid/investment in a different way that builds up local capacity instead of dependence. Which isn't always easy or straightforward, but the first step is the intention.

It will often be less beneficial for the fortunes of the "developed world" based institutions behind the philanthropy though, which is why the unconsidered default is often in the other direction (even without actual malicious intent which sometimes exists too), and it takes extra intention and commitment and willingness to sacrifice some self-interest.

> So the logic is flawed. You want to promote investment in a place with nothing to invest by not investing in that place.

Why do you think they don't have anything to invest?

Because the concept of capital was already created elsewhere in the world and now they have to obtain something that they never had to begin with.

How do you compete with something you didn't know existed until it showed up on your beaches and started stealing people?

I'm not sure it is possible to have a more flawed understanding of capitalism or Africa than this. Have you ever even been to an African country?

How did European countries originally create the capital to invest?

Very, very slowly. The Little Divergence, where Western Europe started to grow faster than any region had ever done before in a sustained way, started in the 1300s. It was the 1800s before the Great Divergence[1] happened and it became obvious that the West was doing something new in human history, sustained economic growth large enough to outpace population growth, that could be sustained.

Europe generated the capital to invest very, very slowly. The joy of foreign direct investment is in but having to spend centuries saving up.

[1] ACCOUNTING FOR THE GREAT DIVERGENCE Stephen Broadberry

http://www.ehes.org/ehes2015/papers/Broadberry.pdf

Primitive Accumulation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm (see ch. 26-33)

Seriously?

It's easy when you're the first one in a non-globalized world where you literally create the capital by yourself, for yourself, and then spend it on yourself.

But trying to start an economy in Africa while competing with the pre-existing economy of the rest of the world... How is that the same thing?

So what about something like:

* US charity that recycles US-hotel used soap

* The recycled soap is resold in US as a charitable item

* Profits from recycled soap sales are used to help fund/grow 3rd world soap manufacturers, or to help them lower the cost to make it, or subsidise the cost to more available to citizens of their country

I see your point and, I know it seems a little roundabout, but could this solve the issue?

Depends on whether you want the people to have soap, or their local strongman to have a soap-money-financed golden AK47.

If it brings the price of gold AK47s down for average Americans I’ll take option 2

I think it would be worth a try!

On the other side of the coin then you would have African STEM working on trying to find enough recycled soap. That would probably be problematic because the ratio of supply from hospitality can't touch the backlog of demand caused by poverty. So you provide them the soap and that's one less obstacle standing in their way as they tackle more actionable problems.

The worst is that a country like China does regular business with them (for better or for worse) and we (US) criticize them for political reasons with no regard to whether it's good for Africa or not, just whether it's good for us (politically that is—to criticize Chinese influence/power).

I think it's more complicated than that: a country can't become self-sufficient in the long term if the majority of its population either flees or starves to death in the aftermath of an ecological disaster. You need foreign food and medical aid in that sort of situation, because your domestic capacity can't possibly grow to fit the needs.

Similarly for little things like soap: they're essential for basic health, but economically they fall into the "discretionary purchases" bucket. If the people being supplied by this nonprofit don't have the discretionary income to purchase locally-manufactured soap in the first place, then you're not curtailing any amount of domestic industry by providing it to them for free. Counterintuitively, you're promoting long-term domestic economic security by ensuring that more children make it to productive adulthood.

(All of this not to say that things like clothes donation's can't hurt the recipient's economy, which they certainly can. But I don't think that cynicism is warranted in this case.)

Yeah, it would be better if instead the first world countries stopped destabilising governments and stealing natural resources in the third world. They might have a decent chance at developing independently then.

Bingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Afri...

Indeed. It is wildly counterproductive over the long term. The things we dump on them are largely things they’re well able to make for themselves. If we wanted to dump stuff that would have real, long term impacts we’d be sending cutting edge technology or capital goods that enable more development, like solar panels or biogas setups. Shipping free, cheap commodity products that they could just as easily have jobs making themselves just means fewer jobs producing those commodities.

In fact West African countries have a centuries old method of making soap from locally available material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_black_soap

While the base (ash in this case) can be locally produced, africa as a continent isn't a big edible oil producer/exporter, and that's usually the expensive part in soapmaking.

And one could argue that plant ash isn't the most sustainable source of base in making soap.

West Africa is the home of the oil palm, and doesn't need to go full Borneo to produce adequate amounts of fat for saponification.

Maybe the home, but that doesn't mean productive. They're not producing enough to export, and seem to even be net importing it:

https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/palm-oil

But maybe not being well represented here indicates a healthy domestic market.

(and this data can be suspect: Netherlands aren't growing any, but might do some processing of some kind or re-export)

https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?commodity=palm-oil shows 84% of production being from Indonesia and Malaysia.

Why would you consider exports a useful metric here? Soap can be manufactured with oil for domestic consumption.

Shea oil.

> There's really no reason US recycled soap needs to be the soap that is sent to (eg) Africa, shipped over oceans. Doesn't (eg) Africa have it's own soap production facilities?

The article mentions several target areas that are under civil war and natural catastrophe conditions, where soap production might be collapsed. Syria, for example, was renowned for their Aleppo soap, whose recipe was allegedly over a thousand years old, and whose original production facilities were in one of the most embattled locations in fights between Western Forces and the so-called Islamic State (Syrian refugees have started making that soap again in their exile, mostly in Turkey). I'd wager soap production in Haiti also was impacted.

I once was in the "don't send them goods, send them money so they can buy local goods and help their economy" camp. Then I experienced the high levels of corruption in these countries, and how money easily disappeared. It's hard and unprofitable to make a truckload of soap disappear, unless the local warlord has some kind of soapy-water fetish.

I picked up on the 60% reduction point too. He got the idea in 2008 and looking at the chart you see the trend is constant over the last 30 years, so we can’t see any impact from their work in the plot. That’s not to say they haven’t helped to improve hygiene, but maybe hygiene would have been improved by other means (local soap, other NGOs, general sanitation)

> Still, even the 60% reduction in such deaths over 20 years alone is pretty great and I hadn't known about it!

If you're interested about lots more statistics about how things have majorly improved in fairly recent history in lots of areas, albeit with lots of caveats about how there's certainly still more work to do, I can highly recommend Hans Rosling's book Factfulness.

I wonder if you could use Vaccum treated water as a backup if you run out of soap.

There's videos of oil and water mixing in a vacuum blender, could they make a vacuum faucet that doesn't need soap? Would it remove pathogens?

Maybe they could electrolize salt to hypochlorous acid the way Force of Nature does, for use if you've touched something especially filthy.

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