THE NEW CONSUMERS

Who would have thought it? There are well over one billion people in seventeen developing nations and three transition nations with enough income to rank as thoroughly middle class. They enjoy a collective spending power, measured in local purchasing capacity, of $6.3 trillion per year, putting them almost on a par with the United States (Table 1). They could well increase their numbers by half as soon as 2010, and their spending power by still more. This is the biggest consumption boom ever known in such a short time.

Of course the new consumers should be enabled to enjoy their new-found affluence, provided their activities do not impose undue environmental and hence economic harm at both national and international levels. Hopefully the new consumers can learn from the mistakes, also the positive experiences, of the long rich nations in order that their environmental impacts remain acceptable. Hopefully too the rich-world consumers can be persuaded to adopt less environmentally harmful lifestyles which could then serve as models for the new consumers. Fortunately there is much scope for all nations to practice less energy use, greater recycling of materials, enhanced pollution controls and other forms of waste management, in fact resource conservation all round.

The new consumers buy household appliances of many sorts, notably refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners, plus television sets and videos, even personal computers-all being marks of the "newly arrived." This entails much electricity, generally derived from fossil fuels which not only cause local pollution but also carbon dioxide emissions-and worldwide these emissions contribute roughly half of global warming processes.

The new consumers are likewise shifting to diets strongly based on meat, which they can enjoy every day instead of once a week. This entails environmental problems because meat is often raised partially on grain, which tends to overload croplands, diverts irrigation water in nations that already suffer water shortages, and puts pressure on international grain markets. Most new consumer nations import large amounts of grain to feed their livestock rather than their millions of malnourished people (Table 2).

The new consumers are also buying cars in large numbers. They already possess one fifth of the global fleet, a proportion that could reach one third by 2010 (Table 3). Cars not only cause a great deal of local pollution but are the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. To this extent, the entire world community has an interest in the prospect of all those new cars in new consumer countries-just as the new consumer countries have an interest in the far larger numbers of cars in developed countries. Fortunately many new consumers can, if they feel inclined, purchase those cars that are more sparing in their CO2 emissions, notably Toyota's Prius and Honda's Insight.

Now for the population connection. Two new consumer nations are "consumption powerhouses" with almost half of all new consumers: China with 300 million and India with 130 million. They do not have nearly so many new consumers in proportion to their populations as do 17 of the other 18 countries (Table 1). But purely because of their outsize populations, a proportion of under one quarter in China's case still means 300 million new consumers, while in India a proportion of one eighth still means 130 million new consumers. Just these two countries' populations are projected to expand during the current decade (2000-2010) by over 250 million, by contrast with only two thirds as much for the other 18 countries. Conversely an average Indian uses only one seventeenth as much energy as an American, so although India's population is 3.6 times larger than the United States', it uses less than one fifth as much energy.

Seven out of the top 10 most populous countries in the world-China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico and Russia-are new consumer countries with 725 million middle classers, 68% of the 20 countries' total. They contain 3.2 billion people, over half the world's total. Just these seven countries, out of 200-plus worldwide, account for almost half of the planet's annual population growth. This is not to say of course that an increase in total numbers must necessarily mean an increase in new consumer numbers; a lot of the increase will be among the poorer sectors of society (which usually have the largest families). All the same, population growth will add to the increase of the more affluent sectors and hence to their consumption.

A further important linkage between new consumers and population is that these people generally have fewest children (though often more than they want). In India the richest one fifth have at least one child less than the poorest one fifth; and much the same applies in many of the other 19 countries. Conversely, the parents of a small family, being relieved of the costs of bringing up many children, have more money to spend on meat, cars, household appliances and the like. But there is an exceptionally disturbing factor of population in relation to affluence. In India and China, new consumer parents reveal a preference for small families even while they still place a high premium on sons rather than daughters. Hence an upsurge in both infanticide and foeticide of females. The latter method is becoming prominent following the arrival of high-tech machines with capacity to discern the gender of a foetus toward the end of the first trimester. During the past decade, the number of girls under six in New Delhi, for instance, has slipped from 945 per 1000 boys to 865-and in areas with some of the most affluent neighborhoods, as few as 796 girls, these being the areas with best access to abortion facilities. Much the same is happening in China. Amartya Sen, an Indian Nobel Laureate in Economics, believes that at least 80 million females have "gone missing" in these two countries during the past few decades.

Crunch factor: how can the new consumers be persuaded to enjoy their affluent lifestyles in sustainable fashion? They can make a fine first step by accepting that consumption patterns will certainly change in the future, if only by force of the environmental and human health risks associated with fossil fuel-caused air pollution, fresh water shortages and other over- or mis-use of natural resources. The new consumers can then go on to change their spending patterns to reflect quality of life rather than quantity of lifestyle. How can they prevent yesterday's luxuries from becoming today's necessities and tomorrow's relicts? How can they make fashion sustainable and sustainability fashionable?

Bear in mind the bottom-est line of all: the new consumers are unlikely to alter their consumption until the rich-world consumers take solid steps to modify their own consumption. And when the non-shopping gets tough, the tough will recall that however hard it will be for us to live with the profound changes required, it will not be nearly so hard as to live in a world profoundly impoverished by the environmental injuries of current consumption.

Source: Myers, N. and J. Kent. 2004. The New Consumers. Island Press, Washington DC (in press).

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