sustainability
crisis, like a war, nations pull together and re-direct resources away from individual consumption into public goods – sadly, in the case of war, the public goods are weapons. But where is our global sense of crisis today? The problems, in as far as we acknowledge them – and even climate change remains contested today – are always someone else’s fault. Yet you are recommending a policy of global accountability?
has arrived in Asia too and resulted in huge conspicuous consumption and food wastage in a region where there are still hundreds of millions of people who are malnourished. Liz: Wait a moment. I get the point and it’s exactly why I don’t have bottled water at home or in restaurants, when there’s perfectly good Chateau de la Pompe available. In fact, tap water also works in most reasonable Indian hotels too these days. But what do you mean by food subsidies? We do support our farmers through the European community, but it’s a vicious circle. We have to support them because the prices in the supermarkets are too low to pay them a living wage. So are the supermarkets – or even capitalism itself – to blame? Chandran: I point my finger straight at the consumer – in other words, at you and me. The consumer is treated as some kind of sacred animal when in fact most of us are prone to behaving like idiots, lemmings prey to the next must-have fad or brand. We demand shampoo that comes in five brands and 10 differently coloured bottles or cheap food that we stuff ourselves with and we want this and next year’s goods at last year’s prices. As a whole, we are making bad decisions and only the public sector, governments or inter-governmental bodies can take
Dialogue | Jun/Aug 2014
the unpopular decisions that result, ultimately, in radical changes to our lifestyles. We are in denial. Most people won’t be “good” just because they know they should. Most of us need regulation and legislation to curb our endless appetites and ability to behave badly. We need new, tougher rules for a constrained 21st Century. As humans, have we lost the will or chance to change? Smog isn’t just China’s fault – it’s all our faults and we should all pay. Instead, we all want cheaper goods made in China or Bangladesh. McKinsey has predicted that there will be 1.5 billion cars in the world by 2020. If Asia reaches Western levels of car ownership, that number will be three billion instead, and just keeping that number of cars on the road would require four times OPEC’s current output of oil. Even as it is, the World Health Organization predicts road accidents will be the third leading cause of death by 2020. We simply can’t allow it. Instead, we need to create a globally shared model of prosperity and normalize human lives across the planet. Liz: Isn’t this Utopia beyond the grasp of most of us? Haven’t we already proved that communism doesn’t work and that capitalism is pretty broken too. So what is the vehicle that can ensure global enforcement of a simpler individual life for us all? In a
Chandran: I never said the execution would be easy. What is easy is identifying what needs to be done and the steps we need to take. There are two steps we should take immediately. The first is to elect political leaders with the will to take action, rather than the will to get re-elected. The ideological struggle between East and West is an unhelpful distraction. The future of humanity in the 21st Century depends upon equal access to resources. We already have too many p00 burger, a burger which takes into account the 55 square feet of rainforest and the 2,393 litres of water that it takes to produce it. Real pricing, not subsidized pricing or exploitative pricing, which ensures that we have underfed children and underpaid adult workers at the same time as endemic obesity in the Western world and rising obesity in the developing one. Underpinning all of this is our apparently insatiable desire for variety, as long as it’s cheap. No more Buy-One-Get-One-Free’s encouraging us to buy what we don’t need at prices that don’t anywhere near reflect the cost of production. Sadly, an entire generation of young people is currently being taught just these tactics at business schools around the world. Liz: In the UK today, the Trussell Trust estimates that one million people will rely on food banks in 2014. How can these people, without even a sustainable amount of disposable income, survive if they have to pay the “real” price of the food they eat?
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