Fourteen Years ago, newly married, I proudly showed Mangere Bridge to Mitu, my Indian wife. Her reaction has stayed with me.
Expecting glowing praise for the lack of suicidal bus drivers and unpopulated nature strips, she solemnly said, ‘It’s just not fair’. It was the first time in her life she saw, first hand, the gross inequalities of the world’s distribution of resources.
Chandran Nair is the founder of the ‘Global Institute For Tomorrow’ and author of Consumptionomics. He has insightfully highlighted how this inequality is not only an injustice but also that the battle to alleviate it could bring consumerist capitalism to its knees.
Globalisation has been an important driver of developed nation’s economies.
Automobile manufacturing joint ventures in India, Japanese plasma televisions in Liberia. Literally, mountainsides of Australian and New Zealand coal shipped to Asian steel furnaces.
The West sees gob smacking potential in markets like India where car ownership is 30 per 1000 citizens, compared to 750 per 1000 in the OECD. They feel justified when they see China become the world’s largest car consumer at only 150 cars per 1000.
Killer Consumption
This is Nair’s point. The 20th Century watermark of success is indiscriminate consumption. India and China, deprived of Lycra cycling
shorts and iPads, are making quantum leaps in consumerism. Hungry tigers pouncing about after being freed from the chains of homebred Stalinism. This he believes has to be vanquished, for, if the developing world continues to affectionately adopt this model the world will perish.
If China and India were to have a comparable consumption of cars of 750 per 1000 there simply wouldn’t be enough oil to power 1.5 billion cars.
Nair makes the unsettling claim that Americans consume nine billion chickens a year and that Asia consumes 16 billion. But here is the thing. Asia’s population is 13 times more than that of the US and if they were to consume at American levels, by 2050 they would be impossibly consuming 120 billion birds.
Nair projects this vision of increasing environmental disaster that could, ironically, eventuate with a more equal world.
Startling Paradox
I greatly enjoy Nair’s take on this startling paradox but what is acutely disappointing is his proposed solution.
He believes that Asia should almost solely bear the responsibility of reducing consumption of its citizens. Strong Government intervention with various environment taxes to ensure that Mr Singh or Mr Lee do not aspire to Mr Smith’s Open Plan Townhouse. To settle for less than the West, for the greater good.
Last year, my eyes welled up thinking what a great humanitarian I was.
I went with my Father-in-law’s servant, affectionately called ‘Hero,’ to buy him a mobile phone. Being a tightfisted humanitarian, I purchased the cheapest model.
I pompously handed it to Hero, who looks like a Somali pirate, waiting for the flow of tears and great touching of feet. He took one look at the phone, screwed his face up as if he had taken poison and threw it back across the counter.
‘Touch wallah chaiye!’ (I want the one with the touch screen!).
Hero is illiterate and comes from one of the poorest districts of West Bengal but he would dutifully see the advertisements for local rip-offs of the iPhone in the Times of India.
The heart of India is now host to the strongest consumerism.
They will not take second best even if it kills the planet. Why should they?
Expecting India to punish her citizens if they aspire to their western counterpart’s level of destruction of the environment is absurd.
India was excluded from 150 years of industrial progress.
The West has molested Mother Nature single-handed and must pay penance.
Roy Lange is a New Zealand citizen with a passion for India. He now lives and works across the Tasman. Email: inz1@yahoo.com
