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Trade Barriers or Problems in Trading

Switzerland has many trade barriers for agricultural imports including price controls, production quotas, import restrictions, and tariffs. Nearly all agricultural products must be imported and licensed at certain times of the year, including those that compete with Swiss products. Additionally, Swiss food chains prefer locally made brands and products made in Switzerland over imported goods. Nestlé has faced controversies over its marketing of infant formula in poor countries in the 1970s and criticism of its bottled water business for undermining public water system investment in the late 1990s. The company also has conflicts with unions over its labor practices abroad and was sued in the US over alleged child labor abuses in its cocoa supply chain, though the Supreme Court later ruled it could not be sued

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133 views2 pages

Trade Barriers or Problems in Trading

Switzerland has many trade barriers for agricultural imports including price controls, production quotas, import restrictions, and tariffs. Nearly all agricultural products must be imported and licensed at certain times of the year, including those that compete with Swiss products. Additionally, Swiss food chains prefer locally made brands and products made in Switzerland over imported goods. Nestlé has faced controversies over its marketing of infant formula in poor countries in the 1970s and criticism of its bottled water business for undermining public water system investment in the late 1990s. The company also has conflicts with unions over its labor practices abroad and was sued in the US over alleged child labor abuses in its cocoa supply chain, though the Supreme Court later ruled it could not be sued

Uploaded by

Robert Peter Villasol
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Trade Barriers or Problems in Trading

Switzerland has a lot of rules and subsidies for farming, like price controls, production
quotas, import restrictions, and tariffs. It's important to note that almost all agricultural products
must be imported at certain times of the year, and they must also be licensed to be imported. This
includes products that compete with Swiss products. To the annoyance of American exporters,
Swiss food chains focus on their own store brands and prefer to buy things made in Switzerland
over things made outside of Switzerland.
Furthermore, for more than two decades the Nestlé name was widely associated with a
controversy, including a longstanding boycott, over its marketing of infant formula in poor
countries. More recently, the company has been one of the primary targets of the global
movement against the bottled water industry. The company’s hardline labor relations practices in
poor countries have made it a villain in the eyes of the international union movement.
During the mid-1970s Nestlé, then expanding steadily throughout the third world, was
made the target of a campaign protesting the marketing of infant formula in poor countries.
Activists from organizations such as INFACT and progressive religious groups charged that the
aggressive marketing of formula by companies like Nestlé was causing health problems, in that
poor mothers often had to combine the powder with unclean water and frequently diluted the
expensive formula so much that babies remained malnourished.
Water Controversies, after entering the bottled water business by acquiring upscale
brands such as Perrier and San Pellegrino, Nestlé began selling less expensive water in poor
countries in the late 1990s. From the start, critics charged that the ready availability of bottled
water, which the company sold under the name Nestlé Pure Life, would make the governments
of those countries less inclined to invest in the infrastructure needed for reliable public water
systems. A 2005 report published by the Swiss Coalition of Development Organizations and
ActionAid raised questions about the purity of the Pure Life water sold by the company in
Pakistan.
Nestlé has traditionally had good relations with unions representing its relatively small
domestic workforce, but its foreign labor record is less harmonious. The company has had
conflicts with unions in various countries, especially in the global South and the United States.
In 2005 the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) brought suit against Nestlé and
several other companies in U.S. federal court under the Alien Tort Claims Act, charging that they
were involved in the abuse and forced labor of child workers in the West African cocoa supply
chain. (In December 2009 Nestlé announced that its Kit Kat chocolate products in Britain would
start to be sold with certification from the Fairtrade Foundation.) A 2012 report by the Fair Labor
Association found numerous serious violations of Nestlé’s own child labor policies among its
suppliers. In 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Nestlé could not be sued in American
courts for child slavery on the African farms run by its suppliers.
In 2008 a Swiss investigative news program reported that five years earlier Nestlé had
used a private security company to infiltrate the anti-globalization group Attac. The undercover
agent reportedly monitored the group’s research work on the company that led to the 2004
publication of a critical book entitled Attac Contre L’Empire Nestlé.

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