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DEVELOPMENT: Sustainable Consumption? I’ll Buy It

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, May 29 2004 (IPS) - Eating indefinitely more will not bring health to the body system, that we all know. That consuming more is damaging society and economy we are less sure about.

“That more food means less health works as a metaphor for all consumption,” Chris Flavin, director of the Worldwatch Institute based in Washington told a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development in London Thursday.

Think food for a moment. The United States had met its needs more than 30 years ago. But food consumption has been going up all the time. “Look around the streets of America, and you will see where those extra calories are going,” Flavin said. But with societies as with persons, “happiness is not going to increase by consuming more.”

Consumption that is far greater than is good inevitably conjures images of society in the United States. “America is a consumption superpower,” Flavin said. “Consumption has been going up and there is no point at which it becomes satiated.”

Over the last 20 years the size of new houses has grown 30 to 40 percent. “You see vehicles in driveways that look like they were meant for desert war in Iraq. You have not two but three-four cars in the driveway, three-four bathrooms in the house.”

Bad, but it is not just the United States that is bad. The consumer society now numbers about 1.7 billion people, “and of these just under half live in developing countries,” Flavin says. There are as many consumers in China as in the United States, as many in India as there are Japanese. The per capita consumption in these countries is lower, but is quickly catching up.

“In recent years an elite group has come up in these countries whose consumption is higher than in industrial societies,” Flavin said. Which makes consumerism a global phenomenon.

A phenomenon in some respects even more worrying in the developing world. “A quarter to a third of all steel manufactured is going to the Chinese market,” Flavin said. So is 40 percent of the world’s cement.

And if China begins to use up as much oil per capita as Japan, global oil production would have to be doubled. But the projections are that oil production could go up around 20 percent over the next ten to 15 years and then fall. “These two divergent trends are not consistent with one another,” Flavin said.

And therefore what? Very few are figuring out yet what that might mean.

‘Sustainable consumption’ is now another buzzword at international seminars, and it was much debated at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. The world has not begun to consume less since then.

Much of the governmental world has interpreted sustainable consumption as meaning cleaner and greener consumption – not less consumption.

“My life would be slightly less comfortable without my ten-pound (16- dollar) pine toilet seat made in China, and I could not have installed it without my two-pound screwdriver from Taiwan,” wrote Alan Knight, chair of the Advisory Committee on Consumer Products and the Environment set up by the British government in response to the commitment to sustainable consumption at Johannesburg.

Knight’s solution was that the wood that goes into toilet seats should be grown with an eye on sustainability, and that the people who make the seat should be decently employed. The committee decided to set up an executive body to promote green consumption. But Knight accepted that “as our prosperity grows, the drive to buy more products grows.”

That will not be enough for society, says the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a London-based non-governmental organisation. The idea of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to “dominate national policy and fascinate the media,” the NEF says in a report. But it advocates instead a Measure of Domestic Progress (MDP) that bears a close resemblance to life-satisfaction data.

Everyone from Gandhi to the cult pop-group Black-Eyed Peas have pointed out that more is not always better, the NEF report says. “Too much food makes the nation obese. Burgeoning traffic leaves the roads congested. More guns make our streets unsafe. Endless choice leaves us hurried and harriedà”

GDP has found its alternative ideas and acronyms. But in the end there is no getting away from the simple idea of simply consuming less.

That is easier said than done. “The consumption mentality is deeply imprinted in the human psyche and in the commercial psyche,” Flavin said. “Companies spend billions of dollars a year to convince us that we need to consume more.” People will need to be educated otherwise, because “they do not connect anything they do as consumers with anything upstream or downstream.”

The system of taxation and subsidies also needs to be reviewed, he said. “We tax income but do not tax consumption. Pollution, energy, consumption taxes make sense.” And in the end industry itself will have to take greater responsibility for what they are doing.

That still begs the question, but how?

“The pendulum is going to swing back in a dramatically different direction in the United States,” he said. “Water is building up behind the dam, and it is showing signs it is beginning to crack.” Behind the change is a faith that people are beginning to look at the right information, and as they look at the right information, they will choose to do the right thing.

And beyond that is the question of the larger faith. “Jesus was not urging people to consume as much as possible,” Flavin said. “You find this throughout religious teaching.” But not throughout the world. Nowhere near, and not yet.