What caused the baby formula desert?

I don't know the source of this, nor whether it is true. 

What caused the baby formula desert?

Looks like the government. Most baby formula comes from a few vendors. One of these is Abbot which produces much of the US supply. Their largest plant is in Sturgis Michigan. The FDA shut it down a few months ago.

The primary rationale for this is that there were "potential bacterial infections". Note the use of the word "potential".

What happened is that there was a complaint by an ex-employee about sanitary conditions at the plant. The FDA sent a team out to look and they wrote a report which outlines a number of vague violations (.e.g, employees were not washing their hands in the prescribed way). This should not have shut down the plant.

However, someone noticed that two babies who used the formula died. Several others got sick. The FDA did not have a conclusive connection... remember the number of babies using this formula was very very large. There are lots of possibilities.

Maybe the potential bacterial infections are real...maybe they are not.

But the FDA does not want dead babies on their watch. So they shut the plant down. It is no cost to the anonymous FDA officials. They are (sort of) responsible for dead babies from bad formula... they are not responsible for dead babies from lack of formula.

Abbot says they are not the likely problem for the infant deaths and says they worked with the FDA to establish this. The FDA is saying nothing substantive and has not indicated what hurdles need to be jumped to reopen the plant. They released a statement yesterday... the only concrete info in the statement is that they are making it easier to import formula.

Meanwhile, Abbot asked for the ability to import more from their Cork Ireland plant... which they are doing and air freighting to the US.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might think the 1,000 dairy farmers supporting the Cork Ireland Abbot plant had a secret association... perhaps the association got their attorney's to hire Fusion GPS to get an ex-Abbot employee from Sturgis to make a complaint. Then they planted a story that babies had died.

Nah...couldn't happen.”

This seems to confirm the story, I guess.