ABSTRACT
Advocacy on behalf of breastfeeding is incomplete and probably ineffective unless accompanied by a politically informed analysis of the obstacles to breastfeeding. This chapter explores the development of infant feeding as a public policy issue over the few decades. It examines the role of nongovernmental groups in influencing public policy, and places breastfeeding within the advocacy debates on the promotion of commercial breast milk substitutes, with the modest goal of putting the voices of industry critics more directly into discussions of the politics of breastfeeding. The chapter deals with a call for anthropologists to include advocacy discourses as a valid addition to other modes of understanding and interpretation. The implications of bottle feeding have not been explored from an environmental perspective with the exception of the position paper by A. Radford. The boycott campaign against the promotion of infant formula begun in 1977 was very successful as a tool for social mobilization in history.
