Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet by Chandra Nair.

Environmental Book Review

Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet

by Chandra Nair

Wiley, 2011

While in favour of nothing more than economic vigour for Asia, Nair is in favour of a future, and if indeed Asia is to have any future, it is a future that requires appropriate resource planning against massive environmental collapse. A reputed economist, Chandra Nair opens the files on the lie that Asia is poised to reap the rewards of unsustainable, consumption-driven growth. 

“Given the failure of Western countries to take a responsibility for the future of the planet,” comments Nair, “it is now time for Asia to step up to the block. This is not to suggest Asia has all the answers. But it is to say that Asia has a central responsibility for determining the world’s fate.” 

Nair explains clearly that growth will occur more quickly than many have projected, and that water resources will be extremely hard hit throughout India and China if planning does not respect this dire limitation. 

In Chapter One, “Asia arrives- And wants it all” Nair presents the actual numbers -“Today, the average American uses 250 kilowatt hours of power a day. In China, the average is 40 kilowatt hours, and in India it is 20 kilowatt hours. If Asia’s population were to use as much energy per person as Americans, then they would consume 14 times as much energy as the United States does now. Even if Asia were to restrict itself to European energy levels- around 150 kilowatt hours per person per day- it would still use eight to nine times as much energy as America." While, as Nair remarks, this may seem exciting for business, “be they car makers or coal miners, in insurance or IT, it would seem that Asia’s huge market potential is finally materializing, ” while in reality, imposing American values on Asia represents a deadly endeavour. “If we push the world’s economy towards being six or seven times bigger than now… we can be sure that more and more of those resources will be driven to the point of collapse. The region where these collapses will have the most immediate and greatest impact will be Asia.” 

Nair discusses water. “Water is its most pressing resource issue. Almost without exception, countries across Asia are seeing the amount of water available to each of their citizens fall sharply.” Most extreme is Pakistan’s situation, where agriculture accounting for 96 percent of all water withdrawals, causing per capita water resources to fall by “more than half in the first five years of this century.”

 Not one to deviate to emotional writing, Nair, in creating a solutions-based blueprint for an economically-healthy Asia, leaves perhaps the most important note of the book obvious but unspoken. The act of emulating the Western lifestyle represents treason against the nations impacted, and is an act of war against the people of India, China, and surrounding Asian nations. Most curious about those investors who focus their energies on a “fast-buck” Western-lifestyle approach to the Asian market, is the offensive attitude that suggests appropriate growth cannot be developed upon the pre-existing Asian world when the societies there have been functioning sustainably for thousands of years. The notion that growth requires a model life-destroying to Asia and, by association, the rest of the planet, speaks volumes about the lack of awareness regarding current models of sustainable economic restructuring. Nair comments, “if the countries of the region press forward with turbo-charged, consumption-fuelled growth, always looking to expand their economies at the maximum possible rate, then the environment will be overwhelmed. There is not the water, the land or the air to support such an economic programme. If it were attempted, billions of people would be badly affected. Many would die – tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? It is impossible to say…And regardless of whether they die or not, billions of people across Asia can only be condemned to live in horrendously depleted environments…Asia, because of the scale of its populations, will run into the question of how to maintain the productivity of these systems in ways that nowhere else will.”

 The negative effects of this process have already provided ample demonstration of their force in recent water conflicts, enough to sound a warning everywhere. While the governments of Asian nations and corporations invested in Asian trade may appear to be acting too slowly around resource sustainability, “governments are, however, finding it difficult to ignore the almost inevitable conflicts that will arise over resources." Reminding us that for two centuries Asia did little choosing, and was a subject of Western colonial power and exploitation of people and resources, Nair comments that a “choice” of capitalism or communism was thrust upon them after the Second World War. “In the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed that finally countries could choose whether to embrace free markets. Except this was not really a choice; it was accepting orthodoxy.” Nair states that already policy arising from the “urging of growth on the one hand and restraint on the other” are pushing Asia to delineate real sustainability. As well, where such markets emerge, intense competition between domestic and multinational interests causes business to disregard their responsibility to the Asian environment in order to ensure short-term advantages. 

Presenting the idea of “Risk Minimization” as a “useful precautionary principal,” Nair cites examples regarding fisheries as a particularly helpful template, based on evolving policy that already exists. Asia would “identify the biggest threats to fisheries” while embracing “smaller steps that might lead to greater goals” including “the setting up of marine reserves, the funding of local eco-tourism projects, the use of quotas or the imposing of bans for part of the year, as China now does. Where economic returns (are) already low, it might offer compensation and proposals for alternative jobs.” Nair comments that China already “has been promoting the idea of a “harmonious society” rather than “the pursuit of growth at all costs” and that “through its take-off, Japan successfully shared its wealth equitably, avoiding the huge disparities in the United States.” Another hopeful example moving away from a dire water crisis is that of India, “far better positioned to continue with labour-intensive farming than to push hundreds of millions of people from the countryside into the cities.” Furthermore, “in Indonesia, relatively small revaluations of rainforest would be enormous incentive for their communities to develop businesses centered around caring for trees and their products rather than felling them.” Nair comments that while governments in Asia identify “those parts of Western economic and political orthodoxy that do not work for them, they should also be drawing strength from the fact that despite the relentless onslaught…they have all, albeit to varying degrees, resisted market capitalism’s consumption-driven model.” Asian planners have maintained significant trade barriers, China has the economy under state control, and “many Indians, especially among the poor and tribal people...view globalization largely as a source of intrusion, dispossession and pollution.” 

Speaking further on the economic policies which must be implemented to address the specific nature of the challenges facing Asia, and the Asian incentive to develop “their own distinctive forms of the state,” the author explores the way that the countries of Asia, despite their exposure to global ideas and economics, have not seen their political forms converge with those of the West. Outlining three tenets: “that resources are constrained, that use must be shared equitably between current and future generations and that re-pricing them would be the key to producing change, leading to sustainable societies and economies,” Nair constructs a framework to these tenets. “Fiscal measures: This calls for stiff tax on greenhouse gas emissions and all uses of natural resources. “ However, it is “crucial that these taxes be applied across the board—from agriculture and mining to manufacturing, and, where appropriate, service industries.” Citing some of Al Gore's tax ideas, the author emphasizes that “all payroll taxes be eliminated and replaced with pollution taxes aimed at collecting the same amount of revenue.” If there is a technofix, a myopic idea which annoys Nair, the economist believes it will arrive in the form, of ’Dematerializing’ production –making things with far less or even no material,” such as digital products-books or music, as well as advances such as “‘coldzymes’ in detergents, allowing clothes to be washed in cold instead of hot water.” He praises China’s ‘Circular Economy Law’ as “part of the measures aimed at lowering its resource usage per unit of economic output.” In terms of Land Management Practices, “With total demand for food and animal feed expected to double in the region by 2050…at the top of the agenda are investments to protect soil, water resources and biodiversity, and their continued protection through establishment of land-use practices that have the least ecological impact.” More simply, “the industrialization of agriculture needs to be reversed.” Consistent with the pragmatic ideas of writers such as Vandana Shiva, Nair expands on the idea that “agriculture must move towards a regime of low chemical fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide use, replaced where possible with value-adding, labour-intensive techniques,” advising that Asian governments raise the tax on agro-business, reform land-ownership rights, and provide better jobs to prevent the migration of rural people to the cities. Chandra Nair also advises access loans for farmers and the availability of insurance to transform rural economies. As climate change affects weather and food prices inevitably rise, GE crops must necessarily be subject to strict controls, “to ensure that reserves of traditional crops are maintained and countries do not become beholden to agri-business.” While overfishing, illegal trawling and blast-fishing with explosives has severely depleted fisheries, Nair recommends moratoriums, strict monitoring, and “quotas, regional agreements on no-fish zones,” especially “in the productive waters of south-east Asia.” Social resource practices, where “government must rework the rules” requires “sustainable urban and rural environments where people can flourish.” Social management systems with “a particular emphasis on transport, energy and education,” are advised, while “in transport, it is vital to escape the grip of the automotive industry and its interest in having privately owned cars as people’s principal means of mobility.” Elegantly put, but in the context of the rest of the book, sublimely understated. 

It is Nair's view that Asian countries must stop waiting for the West to lead, or to allow the West to define them, “as ‘emerging markets’ or ‘investment destinations,’ as ‘export-oriented’ or as ‘pent-up’ source of enormous consumer demand. Now they must identify and pursue their own long-term sustainable development strategies.” Nair suggests that all countries will be hurt by climate change, and that international negotiations may have little prospect of progress. “It is incumbent, therefor, for countries to act unilaterally and to do so sooner rather than later, in order to strengthen themselves.” Here Nair echoes the optimism of writers such as George Soros, who remind us that nations are unilaterally pursuing inspiring change regardless of climate change conferences. Nair finds calls for the West to take responsibility for greenhouse emissions, such as that at the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009, by Brazil’s president, indicate a “disturbing” tendency to constantly look to the West for answers, “something the West is all too happy to go along with.” In the aftermath of Copenhagen conference, China was widely held responsible for failing to meet a binding agreement. Nair sees some irony in this, as “resistance to change is more deeply rooted in the West than in Asia.”

In his final chapter, titled, How Might Societies Looks? Nair states, “efficiency will be defined by how little material and how few resources are used in the manufacture of a product or the delivery of a service, not how quickly it is made or its cost reduced. Productivity will be measured by resource conservation instead of output volume.” Further detailing the necessary coming shift in terms of conservation in “soil, water and forests” and 'dematerialization' of manufacturing, his closing chapter is the synthesis of a keen economic thinker with a frank social visionary and policy-designer. In his final remarks Nair concludes, “Asians can engage the world on these issues. They have the means. They have the tools. And increasingly, they have the ideas. They have an opportunity to harness development in ways that can meet their needs and desires and produce a global environment that is worth living in.” Tackling what other economists have acknowledged but with an unparalleled scope, this important work represents a direct line-of-sight on the future of an unfolding Asia.

Nair, C. (2011). Consumptionomics: Asia's role in reshaping capitalism and saving the planet. Wiley.