A world of greed and hunger

Ian McDonald

WHEN I was a small boy I remember a gala day in our home in Trinidad: my parents purchased and brought home a refrigerator to replace the old 'ice-box' we had used before. Twenty years and more later, when I used to visit my parents from my home in Guyana, the same fridge was still working perfectly well.

Then there was my first bike, a Hercules, which I got when I was 10 years old: I used it for years and then it was passed on and on various users and it seemed immortal. My father had a Phillips radio which I remember him listening to all the years of my youth. He still had that radio 40 years later when he was long retired in Antigua.

Those of my generation could multiply the examples. In those days products were strong and made to last as a matter of course and, I believe, as a matter of pride. Short-lived, flimsy, disposal are the directions now encoded in the instructions given to manufacturers and those who design, engineer, build, fabricate, mix and generally concoct today's consumer items. A luxury premium is charged for anything genuinely long-lasting. 'Wear, tear, replace' as quickly as possible is otherwise the norm.

And, of course, why not? The ethos spreading throughout the world is the ethos of the business place. And in the business place quick turnover is vital. So why not do everything possible to quicken turnover? Why not, indeed, build in quicker and quicker obsolescence? It stands to reason. It is the inevitable consequence of any consumption-dominated economy. Everything depends on the consumer being induced to spend more and more and one of the ways to achieve this is to send him or her back to buy an item four times instead of three times a week, a month, a year. I would be extremely surprised if big businesses do not all by now have research programmes geared to dilute the strength, reduce the durability and shorten the life of all the products they make for the mass market. I expect they would all deny it but you should remember that for a very long time Big Tobacco lied about its programme to make cigarettes more addictive.

We simply have to recognise the drastic change which has come over the world. 'The customer is always right' has been obliterated by the demands of the bottom line. The supreme value now is profit. And profit depends on developing to the ultimate degree possible the cult of consumerism. In this cult the consumer is completely different to the old customer. The customer was to be pampered, the consumer is told what he wants. The customer was expected to be a connoisseur, the consumer is encouraged to become an addict. The customer was treated to explanation, the consumer is bombarded by advertisement.

It has to be understood that the normal person does not need, and indeed hardly wants, anything like volume of goods which an economy based on consumerism requires to support it and keep it growing. So it is absolutely rational in such a consumption-oriented world simply to decide what people should want, then tell them over and over and over again they need it and therefore want it and then sell it to them. The philosophy is beautifully summed up in the motto beloved of advertisers: 'You can never get enough of what you don't really want'. The holy grail of the ultimate consumer society is to sell people more and more and more of what they need less and less and less.

What is really dreadful about all this is that while some of the world is hugely over-stuffed with product overkill, most of the world is desperately short of absolute necessities. How can the world go on living like this? I continue to be amazed that the question isn't number one on the agenda of every single international agency meeting, conference or summit. For sure, international consultants should be consulting about nothing else.

Three decades ago the Pearson Commission called the widening gap between the developed and developing countries "The central problem of our times". Well, since then the gap between the richest and the poorest has more than doubled.

Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.

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