Breast milk exports to US are suspended

Salt Lake Tribune, Woods stressed: “We don’t want to be taking milk out of children’s mouths.” Nisay confirmed the company had provided documents showing women were not employed by them until they had breastfed their baby for the first six months.

According to an article on Vice.com published last week and authored by a former Post reporter, about 50 women – many of them poor – have been employed by the company to sell their excess breast milk for 64 cents an ounce, typically making a little over $7 a day. The milk is then sold in the US for $4 an ounce.

In an interview with AFP, Chea Sam, a 30-year-old mother, said she had been selling her breast milk for the past three months, earning up to $10 a day, six days a week.

“I am poor, and selling breast milk helped me a lot,” she said.

“We all cried when the company informed us about the suspension. We want it to be in business.”

In a YouTube video posted by “Kun Meada”, which roughly translates to “gratitude for the mother” in Khmer, a man purporting to be Woods’s father asks the prime minister and the Health Ministry to change tack.

The man, who identifies himself as Lemonde Woods, spoke of the company’s mission to “empower women” and “do business well by doing good”.

“We’re anxious to give that good here to Cambodia as well,” he said, explaining that donated breast milk could be used to nourish abandoned babies in the Kingdom.

“But if we can’t keep the doors open and continue to export into America to . . . sell it to women and babies there in America who need it, then this business is over.”

Another customs official, who spoke on condition of an-

We all cried when the company informed us about the suspension

onymity as he was not authorised to speak with the media, added that there was concern about the export of a human product and questioned whether it existed on a similar plane to organ trafficking.

“Because it is from the human body, we are afraid they have a virus,” he said.

He admitted the company had exported the breast milk on six occasions already.

“Yes, but it was just a little, that’s why we allowed them to do it without permission from the Ministry of Health; it was only a little and a sample only, that’s why we let them go,” he said.