The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) announced a “strategic partnership” with Nestlé to establish the World Food Academy 4 Sustainable Food Systems on 26 March. 

The arrangement incorporates Nestlé’s science and technology seminars, which reached around 7,000 students across over 300 academic institutions in more than 90 countries last year, and will be extended through a joint symposium later in 2026. 

The World Food Academy targets students, early-career researchers, and young professionals “particularly from priority regions in the Global South.”

Within days, an open letter coordinated by the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) and authored by Phillip Baker of the University of Sydney began circulating. It carries nearly 500 signatures from public health researchers, nutritionists, lawyers, and civil society organisations around the world. It calls on UNU-INWEH to terminate the partnership immediately. Its reasoning is grounded in the UN’s own published standards for engagement with the private sector.

Nestlé is the largest transnational food corporation in the world. It is a documented and persistent violator of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes – the 1981 World Health Assembly instrument created, in substantial part, in response to the company’s marketing practices. 

It is among the largest global manufacturers of ultra-processed foods, identified by the 2025 Lancet series on ultra-processed food as a principal commercial determinant of diet-related chronic disease. 

Distorting nutrition science

It is also documented as a major actor in the broader pattern by which large food and beverage corporations distort nutrition science – funding research designed to produce favourable findings, sponsoring professional societies, and undermining the independence of the evidence base that public health policy depends on. 

It participates in industry associations that lobby against public health regulation of food marketing and against the breastmilk code. 

Nestlé’s UN-system footprint expanded sharply between December 2025 and March 2026. A UNFPA coalition membership on women’s health, the UNU-INWEH academy, and a new ILO partnership on labour rights in coffee supply chains were announced within five days of the academy. 

None of these partnerships, nor their concentration in a single four-month window, has been the subject of any published UN-system review.

Criminal investigation

The contradiction is sharpest at the level of UNU-INWEH itself. Nestlé’s water-related conduct is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in France, regulatory action in the United States, and decades of Indigenous-led litigation across the Americas over aquifer depletion, over-extraction, and unauthorised treatments. 

A water institute lending its name to a company whose water practices are themselves the subject of regulatory and judicial proceedings is the textbook case of reputation washing.

The UN system has spent two decades building rules of engagement for this kind of oppositional arrangement. The 2015 UN Guidelines on Cooperation between the UN and the Business Sector require that partnerships advance UN aims and that partners demonstrate commitment to human rights and Global Compact principles. 

The 2017 UN Sustainable Development Group Common Approach to Due Diligence requires documented scrutiny where there is public brand association, exchange of assets, or promotion of a business-led initiative – all three of which this partnership involves. 

UNDP has translated these principles into a detailed operational policy with exclusionary criteria, risk-tiered due diligence pathways, and decision-making separated from initiating staff. 

Breach of due diligence policy

UNU has its own due diligence policy, promulgated by the rector in September 2024, with comparable exclusionary criteria and a requirement that high-risk business-sector partnerships be escalated to institute directors in consultation with the office of the rector.

A more specific layer applies to the food and nutrition sector. UNICEF’s 2023 guidance states categorically that it will avoid all partnerships with Code violators and with ultra-processed food manufacturers. 

WHO’s Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors (FENSA) identifies the conferral of UN legitimacy on corporate actors as a foundational risk. World Health Assembly Resolution 69.9 of 2016 calls on academic institutions not to allow companies marketing foods for infants and young children to sponsor meetings or enter promotional partnerships. 

In 2024, WHO and UNICEF jointly reaffirmed the principle of avoiding all partnerships with Code violators. Beyond these frameworks, an open-ended intergovernmental working group is negotiating, under Human Rights Council Resolution 26/9, a legally binding instrument to give the voluntary 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights binding force.

The Nestlé partnership is a breach of these provisions. The accountability failure is not procedural. It is categorical: the partnership is of a kind the UN system’s own frameworks identify as one to avoid, and UNU’s own Due Diligence Policy provides the mechanism that would have caught it. That mechanism does not appear to have been applied.

Levels of harm

The harm operates on two levels. The first and most fundamental is to children, mothers, and parents whose feeding choices, nutrition, and health are shaped by the marketing practices and product environments the Code exists to regulate. 

The second is to the UN system itself, and to the institutions whose work the partnership undermines – among them WHO, UNICEF, and UNU’s own International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH).

UNU-IIGH, in Kuala Lumpur, hosts a ‘power and accountability’ research programme covering, among other things: accountability deficits of the world’s largest food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and financial corporations; the political economy of commercial milk formula marketing; aggressive tax avoidance by transnational corporations that drains public fiscal capacity in the Global South; and governance capture of inter-governmental institutions. 

Among the programme’s recent outputs is a Lancet article on the inadequacy of current efforts to hold corporations accountable. The Nestlé partnership undermines this work.

Publicly funded research products are lost, inter-agency collaborations disrupted, and the institutional voice of researchers working on commercial determinants of health is structurally weakened. Three years of work is now shadowed by an arrangement the work itself would have recommended against.

The case is not isolated. In late 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the WHO Regional Office for the Americas, signed a three-year Framework Agreement with Ferrero International to support initiatives for “children, adolescents, and families in vulnerable conditions.” 

Researchers, civil society, and the BMJ raised the same concerns that the IBFAN letter raises now: a UN agency lending its name to a major ultra-processed food manufacturer in the very policy domain where the company’s interests run against the public health evidence. On 15 April 2026, PAHO terminated the agreement.

Private funding filling gaps

Two cases, two UN agencies. The pattern is not accidental. The UN’s financial architecture – assessed contributions are now a small proportion of operating budgets, with voluntary earmarked private funding filling the gap – rewards arrangements with well-resourced private partners and penalises institutes that decline them. 

Reinforcing this is the multi-stakeholder model that the World Economic Forum and the World Health Summit have promoted for two decades as the standard architecture of global governance – framing corporations, philanthropies, and states as equivalent partners, weakening public responsibility and intergovernmental accountability. Without active central enforcement of the UN’s own frameworks, the pressure runs one way.

The UN is a global public institution. Its founding Charter establishes it as an institution designed to serve the peoples of the world. It derives its mandate and legitimacy from member states acting through intergovernmental bodies: the World Health Assembly, the General Assembly, and the governing councils of the specialised agencies. 

Its authority rests on the premise that it represents collective public interest, not the interests of particular donors or sectors. Each partnership of this kind erodes public trust in the multilateral system itself, at a moment of declining public confidence in international institutions. 

Within this system, UNU institutes occupy a particular role: an academic and rigorous think tank governed by an independent academic council, providing space for constructive critique while operating in accordance with UN principles. 

Enforcing existing guidelines

When UNU lends its name to a company whose practices the UN has spent decades regulating against, the exchange is clear: the corporation gains legitimacy and access to the next generation of food and nutrition professionals. The UN loses its legitimacy as the arbiter of the standards it exists to uphold.

What is required is not new guidelines. They exist. What is required is enforcement –  transparently, with documented risk-benefit analyses, with decision-makers separated from the staff initiating partnerships, with published exclusionary criteria actually applied. 

UNDP has done this; UNU has the equivalent on paper but appears not to have applied it here. Direct correspondence with the UNU rector and the directors of UNU-INWEH and UNU-IIGH, raising these concerns, has to date received no response. 

Under UNU’s own due diligence policy, a business-sector partnership of this scale would require enhanced due diligence with the direct involvement of the institute director and consultation with the office of the rector. Whether that consultation occurred, and what it concluded, is now the central question.

Three steps must follow. First, UNU-INWEH should terminate the partnership and publish the due-diligence record that preceded its announcement. 

Second, UNU should apply its existing due diligence policy to the Nestlé case and expand its exclusionary criteria to align with the food and nutrition sector frameworks the broader UN system has already adopted – including ultra-processed food manufacturers and Code violators alongside the tobacco and weapons categories the policy already names. 

Third, the United Nations must take enforcement of its own engagement frameworks more seriously, including review by the UN Sustainable Development Group of concentrated patterns of corporate engagement, such as Nestlé’s recent clustering of partnerships across UN agencies, and active management of conflicts of interest, including the instrumentalisation of UN legitimacy by private actors.

The credibility of the UN system depends on the clear separation of its public mandate from the commercial interests its work often contests. Once that line is blurred, it becomes very difficult to draw again.

Dr Unni Karunakara is a Senior Fellow at the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale Law School in the US; the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, and a visiting professor at Manipal University, India. He was the interim director of the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH)  in 2024-2025.  and international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) from 2010-2013. He has held various academic and research fellowships at universities in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Germany and the United Kingdom, focusing on forced migration, and healthcare delivery to neglected populations affected by conflict, disasters and epidemics. 

Image Credits: FDA, WHO.