The International Baby Food Action Network, IBFAN, consists of public interest groups working around the world to reduce infant and young child morbidity and mortality. IBFAN aims to improve the health and well-being of babies and young children, their mothers and their families through the protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding and optimal infant feeding practices. IBFAN works for universal and full implementation of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and Resolutions.
In 1998 IBFAN received the Right Livelihood Award. The RLA Jury has honoured IBFAN “for its committed and effective campaigning over nearly twenty years for the rights of mothers to choose to breastfeed their babies, in the full knowledge of the health benefits of breastmilk, and free from the commercial pressure and misinformation with which companies promote breastmilk substitutes.”
IBFAN's Seven Principles are:
- The right of infants everywhere to have the highest level of health.
- The right of families, and in particular women and children, to have enough nutritious food.
- The right of women to breastfeed and to make informed choices about infant feeding.
- The right of women to full support for successful breastfeeding and for sound infant feeding practices.
- The right of all people to health services which meet basic needs.
- The right of health workers and consumers to health care systems which are free of commercial pressures.
- The right of people to organise in international solidarity to secure changes which protect and promote basic health.
Famous quotes containing the words baby, food, action and/or network:
“The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 6:6-8.
“A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)