 It's been over a year since the baby formula shortage began in the US. While the crisis is not as dire as it was in mid-2022, there are still shortages in various parts of the country. In fact, there have been indications in recent months of supplies dwindling again. What caused the scarcity in the first place and why does it continue? For the past year, families in the US have faced a severe shortage of infant formula, which was mainly related to a closure of an Abbott nutrition factory in Michigan last February, so in February 2022. The main issue was that Abbott held a significant share of the US infant formula market, and it actually was one of the major players for supplying formula to the government-sponsored program, which allows families to access baby formula at a discounted price. And so what happened after the closure was that the shelves in many, many supermarkets and many pharmacies remained empty, and it became a very big issue accessing baby formula when parents needed it. This caused a series of issues, so both people choosing between doing homemade formula, which is quite unsafe, but also essentially they tried to access formula through the black market, which was not the safest thing to do as well. After the shortage began, what we saw in the US was that the government tried to address the situation by boosting the production at home, so essentially by working with the other suppliers, other producers of infant formula in the US, but also to import more, which they saw as the best short-term solution to the problem. Now a year has passed, and what we have seen is that the problems have decreased if we compare them to May to July, let's say 2022, so the stocks have gone up, but people are still reporting problems in access, so the problems are felt mostly by people, by families in rural areas, in working-class neighborhoods, and that's because these groups have trouble in actually allocating the, they don't have the resources needed to track formula in the market conditions, which we are seeing now. So at the moment, if you're living in a rural part of the US, and if there is no infant formula in your town, you're forced to look for it in other places, which means that you have to give it enough time, which many people don't have, because they have jobs, they have second jobs, they have third jobs, and then in addition to that, you have to take the time, and of course you have to pay for the gas, and for the other things that you need to actually get to the other place, where you have located the formula. And then in many cases, it turns out that while you find the formula, while you drive to get it, and while you get there, it's actually sold. So again, the situation has improved compared to last year, but it's still not at the point where, at an optimal point, let's put it that way. While issues of production and supply may have been the triggers for the crisis, a long history of industry lobbying and misplaced policy priorities laid the ground for the crisis. What are these factors? The issue with the United States in particular is that they rely a lot on infant formula. So infant formula has become the standard of feeding babies for a majority of people in the US, actually, and that's the critical point. So when we look at the US, so breastfeeding is perceived as an alternative, while infant formula is taken as a standard. And we know from the WHO, we know from many other public health warnings that it actually should be the other way around. So infant formula should be used in cases where it's health-appropriate and where there isn't another way to feed the babies. So it's one thing that should be pointed out. It's not about the parents choosing, it's not the parents fault that they choose the formula over breastfeeding, but it's the situation which makes it impossible for families to consider other ways of feeding babies in comparison to feeding them baby formula in the US. So this is one thing. And then this kind of policy framework is impacted by several things. So we can start with the enormous amounts of money that the commercial milk formula industry has poured into marketing and poured into lobbying the US government in the US and essentially making sure that the products are very visible, they're very much supported and they're just promoted as something that's desirable and that actually sometimes has health benefits, which again we know that they don't actually have that kind of benefit. That's one thing. Another set of policies which impacts this kind of reliance on baby formula is the labor context because we know that the US is one, it's actually the only so-called industrialized country in the world which does not have paid mandatory maternity leave. So that means that essentially you give birth, there's no leave, you don't have time to actually learn about breastfeeding, you don't have access to the resources at the hospital, at home, in discussion with health workers, which would enable you to breastfeed and which would allow the baby to be breastfed until it's at least six months old and necessarily even longer. So what needs to happen to actually shift this context which we are seeing in the US now is that the government takes a very radical turn. It's not about making sure that there is this amount of baby formula on the shelves, but it's also strengthening the other things that actually allow for better nutrition for infants and children. This would again mean different labor policies which would mean parental leave, family leave, maternal leave. It would also mean more support for human milk banks which are an alternative to infant formula which is not being talked about so much. And then again it has a lot to do with breaking this link with the industry which is very, very strong at the moment and it has actually led to a situation where you have a very small number of companies dominating the market and making billions of dollars on such an important part of human nutrition.