Message to All Students!

INFACT is a corporate watchdog organization that is currently coordinating a boycott of Kraft foods.  Kraft is owned by Philip Morris, and Philip Morris is the company that makes Marlboros cigarettes; they're the largest tobacco company in the world. They're huge, because besides Marlboros they make a lot of money through other products you eat everyday such as Kraft Dinner and Jello.

Why should you care?  Apart from the fact that they use the money we give them through buying Kraft Dinner and Jello to sell us products that will kill you if you smoke long enough, or hang around people who do, they also use this money to influence the people in power, by lobbying against laws and policies that make it harder to advertise or sell tobacco products.

In the United States, the tobacco companies donate millions of dollars to both the Republican and the Democrats, so that it doesn't really matter who wins the election; the politicans understand that this money means their 'friends' want favours done. And so their interests become tied up with that of the tobacco companies, which means they vote against new laws that ban cigarette advertising on television, or youth-directed advertising. The same thing happens up here in Canada! This is the reality of the way politics works right now, which is why everyone's so cynical about the whole process.  But there are alternatives to this system, there are better and more effective ways of doing things to change this state of affairs. And these alternatives involve doing things for ourselves, like boycotting their products.

If you think we don't stand a chance against this kind of corruption and influence, that we can't really change anything, consider this:  If there are about 1000 of you here, and even one out of every two of you gets your family to stop buying anything by Kraft by the end of this week, or this month, that's about 2000 less customers of their products, and that's a lot less money that they have that they can give to Philip Morris to spend on tobacco advertising directed at you.

Don't think of this as just you, one person, doing this boycott by yourself and acting alone.  We're going around to every high school in Canada, and you can imagine the impact this is going to have on Philip Morris once everybody joins in.

This is how people like you and I can take on a huge, transnational corporation such as Philip Morris - and win. There's strength in numbers, this is the one power we have as consumers in this society, the power to say "no" to products that are harmful to our health and our environment, the power to hit the companies that make them where it matters, in their bottom line, their profits. We've done it before with Nestle, getting them to stop marketing powdered milk as an ideal substitute for mothers' breast milk in developing countries.  So it may seem like right now this is a small thing and that we're the underdog, but we also know how to win, because it has worked before, and it will work now.

You can volunteer, bring an INFACT speaker to your school and let people know --- Boycott Kraft!