Sustainability - A Matter of Choice

International consumption and trade



Consumption practices today are characterized by a colossal gap between North and South. The US and Canada, for example, with only 5 per cent of the world's population, consume 27 per cent of the world's commercial energy. Consumption practices are exemplified by the throw-away society described earlier. The North creates a false need, and richer people in the South emulate that lifestyle, creating that need too. The huge industries of advertising and public relations are partly responsible for creating false needs in consumers worldwide.

Trade practices both uphold and exacerbate the inequity of the situation. They demand that developing countries provide northern countries with raw materials from natural materials, at low cost. High demand often leads to the rapid depletion of natural resources in the country of origin, and low prices mean insufficient funds to replenish them.

Ironically, countries in the South then purchase products made from the very natural resources they exported to the North, but at a much higher price. These products are often unnecessary or have built-in lifespans, so that parts must be replaced from the North, again at high prices. The North fixes high tariffs against processed products from the South. This discourages countries there from diversifying into manufacture, which might reduce the pressure on their natural resource base.

The result is that countries in the South are stuck in a cycle of endless debt repayment, accompanied by an environmental degradation that they can't afford to prevent.

Poverty puts pressure on the environment. Those who are poor and hungry will often destroy their immediate environment in order to survive. They will cut down forests; their livestock will overgraze grasslands; they will overuse marginal land; and in growing numbers they will crowd into congested cities. The cumulative effect of these changes is to make poverty itself a global scourge.

It is for this reason unrealistic as well as unreasonable to expect developing countries to curb their economic growth in order to compensate for the excesses of northern countries. A balance needs to be found between development and the environment, and that balance will be hard to achieve. While in the North there is now a move to restrict the use of the earth's resources, the problem is that current economic and developmental activities practised worldwide tend not to take the environment into consideration. Governments often forget that many lessons to be learned from the North's development and wealth are not about what to do. They are about what not to do.



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Copyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature