3
Consumption, carrying capacity and class

The question of greenhouse gas emissions is not the only issue for food production. There is a growing sense that the demands of feeding the world’s population are too much for the world’s resources: the efforts to do so are not only causing environmental destruction, but will ultimately fail. It’s often said that climate change is a difficult issue for people to engage with, especially in the developed world, as it doesn’t appear to have concrete, immediate applicability to their everyday lives. Warnings of coming food shortages have a long history, but in the last few years this argument appears to have gone from an abstraction to an urgent reality, set as it is against the background of surging prices in basic goods across the world.

In 2007 and 2008, food prices spiralled worldwide The cost of Thai rice went up by more than 200% between 2007 and April 2008, with increases of 106% for oils and fats, 48% for dairy products and 88% for cereals in only twelve months between March 2007 and March 2008.160 Overall, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s index of internationally-traded food commodities rose 56% between January 2007 and June 2008.¹⁶¹ The high prices of course hit the poorest people hardest, and as people were forced to cut their consumption of meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables just to get enough grain or rice to eat, malnutrition soared: it’s estimated that the number of malnourished people worldwide increased by 75 million in 2007, and another 40 million were added to that total in 2008.¹⁶²

With 848 million people suffering malnourishment in 2006,¹⁶³ these increases by themselves might not necessarily have impinged much on Western public consciousness. That the food price rises of 2007-08 were headline news in the developed world must be in part because the effects were felt here as well, if not so catastrophically. But it is also testament to the fact that, if people were starving, they were not starving quietly. There were demonstrations and strikes around the world as people protested at the cost of staple goods soaring beyond their reach. In January 2007, 70,000 people demonstrated in Mexico City at the doubling of tortilla prices, and protests followed during 2007 and 2008 in, among others, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Bangladesh, India, El Salvador, Haiti, South Africa and Italy.164 In Egypt, a strike by textile workers at Mahalla against rising food prices became a mass demonstration when the strikers were attacked by security forces,¹⁶⁵ and the then-President Mubarak was forced to mobilise the army to produce and distribute subsidised bread in an attempt to contain the protests, which were a preparing ground for the 2011 revolution.¹⁶⁶ Food price rises returned in 2010, as between June and August, wheat prices increased by 50%,¹⁶⁷ described by HSBC analysts as ‘the most dramatic rise for more than 30 years’,¹⁶⁸ and there were also significant rises in the prices of pork and cocoa.¹⁶⁹

Why food prices soar

The reasons for these price spikes range from shortages caused by harvest failures, to shifts from food to biofuel production and market speculation in commodities. Which of these factors is the most important depends on who you ask, with seemingly every report on the 2007-08 crisis, and the second wave of price rises in 2010, giving a different emphasis. Much of this is unsurprising, as those at risk of being seen as responsible for causing widespread hardship seek to shift the blame. So, for example, Gruma, Mexico’s chief tortilla producer, defended itself against charges of hoarding supplies by blaming the rises in corn prices on increasing US demand for ethanol, made from corn,¹⁷⁰ while the UK government’s Strategy Unit defended the financial markets in 2008 by explicitly denying any possibility that speculation could be behind the price rises.171 It was noted in August 2010 that even the World Bank had performed an ‘about-turn’ on the principal cause of the 2007-08 crisis.¹⁷² A World Bank policy research paper written in July 2008 blamed ‘biofuels and the related consequences of low grain stocks, large land use shifts, speculative activity and export bans’ for 70-75% of the food price rise, with the other 25-30% the result of high energy prices.¹⁷³ In this analysis, speculation was the result, not the driver, of high food prices. However, two years later, after the 2008 crash, another World Bank paper concluded that the contribution of biofuels was overstated, but that financial speculation was a significant cause of the 2007-08 price rises.¹⁷⁴

There is clear evidence that speculation in commodities was an important cause of the food price rises in 2007-08. As the World Development Movement (WDM) explain in their report on the food crisis, The Great Hunger Lottery, market speculation in food and other commodities has been happening for a century, through trading futures contracts. Futures started as a way for farmers to protect themselves against prices falling in the time it would take for their produce to grow and be brought to market, by setting the future price for which the produce would be sold when it was ready. In the nineteenth century, the prices set in these futures contracts were related to what traders thought the level of demand for the produce would be, but in the early twentieth century, futures contracts began to be traded on stock markets as if they were just another financial instrument, so the prices often bore little relation to agricultural realities.

The early years of this century saw a huge increase in trading in food derivatives, as a result of relaxation of financial market regulation. Between 2002 and 2008, the number of derivative contracts in commodities increased by 500%, and speculators held 65% of the contracts in maize, 68% of soybeans and 80% of wheat.175 This meant that the prices in these and other commodities were extremely volatile, so, for example, spring wheat prices leapt by 25% on the US markets on a single day in early 2008.¹⁷⁶ As WDM conclude, it is difficult to explain these sorts of swings except as the result of speculation,¹⁷⁷ which as well as causing price swings, also clearly pushed overall prices higher than they otherwise would have been. Even before the worst of the food crisis, in 2006, Merrill Lynch admitted that in their estimation, speculation in commodities was making the prices at which they were trading 50% higher than if they were based only on supply and demand.¹⁷⁸

The idea that there is a fundamental problem with global supplies has been used as a counterargument to the evidence of the effects of speculation on food prices. The UK government Strategy Unit, for example, stated in their 2008 report on food that the financial speculation argument was ‘difficult to substantiate’ (even if this was so in 2008, the WDM and World Bank reports show that it is no longer), and added that ‘the basic mismatch between demand and supply, and the resulting tightening of markets, is the fundamental issue’.¹⁷⁹ While a continuing commodity price ‘boom’ would of course be extremely bad news for most people in the world, it would be very profitable for investors who could benefit from continually rising prices, and for the commodity dealers. Goldman Sachs, for example, argues that increases in food prices are caused by structural issues and will continue whatever the market does. The fact that in 2009 it made around $5 billion from commodity trading¹⁸⁰ should suggest that this view is not entirely disinterested. However, while the food crisis of 2007-08 gave new impetus to fears that global production was up against its natural limits, it was not the origin of this argument. We have, it seems, been reaching the natural limits of food production for some time.

An important aspect of understanding food’s contribution to climate change is that climate change will have a serious effect on food production. As a result of more extreme weather events it will become more difficult to grow crops or raise livestock in many parts of the world. Drought in sub-Saharan Africa, floods in Bangladesh and Pakistan are only indications of what the effects of global warming may be, and these effects will not be localised. The global market in food means that crop failures in one part of the world could affect food supplies throughout. Crop failures and falls in dairy production because of droughts in Australia and New Zealand are often cited as a factor behind the 2007-08 crisis, while the record heatwave and drought in Russia and the Pakistan floods provided a background to food price rises in 2010. While the arguments that the food price increases in 2007-08 were driven largely by speculation is, I think, convincing, the climate conditions limiting food production in various parts of the world in 2007-10 could be taken as a sign of things to come, and as evidence of how food production not only affects climate change, but is affected by it.

The problem with biofuels

The need to respond to climate change can also create constraints on the use of land for food production. Deforestation is a significant cause of global warming, so forest clearance to create more arable or grazing land is clearly not a climate-friendly option. There is also the question of competition for land use from biofuels. As noted above, diversion of arable land to grow crops for biofuel production has been singled out as a cause of the 2007-08 food price crisis. Although it seems unlikely that a supply constraint caused by biofuel production could have caused the wild price swings seen in the crisis, it seems evident that increasing production of biofuels could have an effect on the amount of crops available for food. Biofuels were the source of the highest increases in demand for crops in the years leading up to the food price crisis: in December 2007, the International Food Policy Research Institute reported that demand for cereals for biofuels increased by 25% between 2000 and 2007, compared to a 4% increase in demand for cereals for food and a 7% increase for animal feed, and that in the same period, the use of corn for ethanol production in the US went up by 250%.181

Replacing fossil fuel use with biofuels may seem an impeccably green idea, but in particular because of their impact on food availability, biofuels have been seen as increasingly problematic. 2007 has been called ‘the year the world woke up to the significant climate, social and human injustice impacts of this new energy technology being foisted on the world’, with calls for moratoria on biofuel expansion.¹⁸² This growing awareness that production of biofuels for use in the developed world could be taking the place of food crops for the poor of the developing world has been countered with promises of ‘second generation’ biofuels with ‘new and improved technologies’.¹⁸³ Whether these would be able to create genuinely sustainable biofuels on a large scale is however unlikely,¹⁸⁴ and the source of the material for particular biofuels is often obfuscated. The story of the UK government’s biofuel requirement is instructive on this point. In April 2008, it introduced a requirement that 2.5% of all road transport fuel had to be biofuels, as part of an EU directive requiring 10% biofuel use by 2020, only to discover that a measure which it had hoped would bolster its green credentials actually brought it considerable criticism, not helped by the timing of the requirement just as concern at food prices was at its height. The government’s response was to support second generation biofuels, but to its embarrassment, four months later it had to admit that it could not trace the source of 80% of UK biofuel imports and therefore could not rule out that they were being produced from potential food crops.¹⁸⁵

The biofuels issue is of course more complex than simply the question of the distribution of crop land between growing fuel and growing food. At base it is an issue of social justice, as the malign consequences of increasing biofuel production – deforestation, food insecurity and so on – proceed not simply from changes in land use but from the replacement of small farmers with multinational biofuel companies. The problem is not just biofuel production, but the structure of global agrofuel production, in which farmers in the developing world are either forced off their land or driven to switch from producing food for themselves and local people to their own cash crop production.186 However, it is clear from recent reports like that of Zero Carbon Britain that even when we are talking about planned large-scale biofuel production in the developed world, biofuels and food production are essentially counterposed. Even removing the concerns which make biofuel production in the developing world such a social justice issue, there remains the assumption that our food production is too resource-intensive to allow a biofuel response to the problem of fossil fuels. Zero Carbon Britain, indeed, argue for a drastic cut in the amount of land used for food production, ‘to release land for other decarbonisation purposes’.¹⁸⁷

The impression given by the land use section in the Zero Carbon Britain report is not of a fundamental shortage of land for food production use: the calculations here provide food, if not resource-intensive food, for the UK population using only 29% of current agricultural land.¹⁸⁸ This might imply that even a small island like Britain has plenty of agricultural land to spare. However, at the base of the arguments about the food crisis is the idea that there is a fundamental resource constraint when it comes to food production, exacerbated by climate change and potential measures to respond to it, but existing separately from the effects of global warming.

Fundamental resource constraints

The fundamental resource constraint is ever-present in discussions of food and climate change. The problem facing livestock farming, according to the FAO, is nothing less than ‘the planet’s finite natural resources’.189 For Garnett, it is ‘that there is only so much to go round’,¹⁹⁰ while the question of the finite planet is made most explicit in a 2008 Chatham House report on the future of food, which centres around a discussion of whether ‘the widely feared fundamental limit to global food production’ is reached or delayed.¹⁹¹ Awareness of ‘the insight that nature limits us’¹⁹² or the fact of ‘the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival’¹⁹³ permeates much of the recent literature on food production. On one level, of course, the fact that the planet is not literally infinite and none of its material resources will go on forever is a truism; the point is that the fundamental limits which logically must exist are becoming relevant, because in this view we are nearly at them.

The effects of climate change, as set out above, clearly play a role in limiting possible food production, as do attempts to respond to climate change (whether helpful or otherwise), such as avoiding deforestation or producing biofuels. These are not, however, the only stresses viewed as pushing against planetary limits. The FAO summed these up as ‘the additional demands [placed] on the environment by a growing and wealthier population’,¹⁹⁴ a conclusion reflected with varying stresses by other writers. For some, the fact of increasing population is the main problem, although not always in such apocalyptic terms as this particularly noxious recent example: ‘A global hurricane of consumption from these rising populations [in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan] is gathering force as it sweeps through each generation’.¹⁹⁵ On the other side of the formulation, the rising consumption of the middle classes in India and China has become a well-known fact for many, such that it is frequently repeated in media discussions of food and resource constraints. In April 2008, for example, a New York Times editorial cited ‘the march of the meat-eating Chinese – that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners’ as a cause of food price rises’,196 while a month later, The Guardian was reporting from China ‘where rising demand for meat from a growing middle class is destabilising world food prices.’¹⁹⁷ In 2011, a Nature article by 21 authors summed up this thinking when it argued that food production would need to double to keep pace with population increases and projected dietary shifts towards more meat and dairy consumption.¹⁹⁸

Within the current system, there are two obvious conclusions which could be drawn from these views of the problems of food, the less unacceptable of which is that, if there is more strain on food resources, those who are currently using the lion’s share should reduce their consumption. The other, particularly with regard to population growth, will be discussed below, as its relationship to both food and class is not as straightforward as it might first appear. For those who are not prepared to argue that Indian and Chinese middle-class people should be prevented from increasing their meat consumption, the only option seems to be to call for less resource-intensive eating patterns in the West. If people in India and China are eating ‘like Westerners’, Westerners themselves will have to eat in a less ‘Western’ fashion.

As with the arguments about food and greenhouse gas emissions, the argument about resources also places red meat and dairy products at the top of the hit list, as the most resource-intensive food products. The FAO in their 2006 report highlighted the contributions of the livestock sector to problems of land degradation, deforestation, water use and pollution of water supplies, the latter particularly important given the effects of climate change on rainfall patterns and water supplies in many parts of the world.¹⁹⁹ However, in the context of a crisis in human food production, the most important issue about meat appears to be the sheer amount of crops grown not to feed humans directly, but to feed cattle. In his introduction to Compassion in World Farming’s 2004 report, Jonathan Porritt estimated that by 2050 cattle would be consuming the same amount of crops as four and a half billion people – equivalent, he noted, to the entire world population in 1970.200 Much of the water use associated with livestock is also not drunk by the cattle directly, but used to irrigate the crops grown to feed them.²⁰¹ This is considered an inefficient use of these scarce resources because not all the calories eaten by the cows are passed on to the humans eating their meat or drinking their milk. In approximate terms, one kilogram of chicken meat would take two kilograms of feed to produce, while one kilogram of pork would need four kilograms of feed, and beef, seven kilograms.²⁰² If humans ate ‘lower down the food chain’,²⁰³ seven kilograms of crops could be turned into seven kilograms of human food.

Changing meat versus changing the system

On one level, this, like the arguments about food’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, can appear as a technical problem, with solutions on a similarly technical, as opposed to systemic, level. This is not to say that there would not still be considerable debate about the precise nature of the problem and the way to solve it. The FAO’s conclusions for example – that livestock farming needs to become more intensive, essentially moving away from small, subsistence farming to farming by large conglomerates – are supported by some writers such as Tara Garnett for the Food Climate Action Network, but have also been hotly disputed.

Simon Fairlie, for example, argues that the answer is re-ruralisation of what should be a much-reduced livestock sector, rather than increasing the trends towards that industrial, intensive production which is the source of the problems of livestock farming.²⁰⁴ However, it is clear that even though the issues are frequently expressed in the technical language of so much grain consumed by cows rather than humans, or so much methane emitted, they should be understood as existing at a much deeper, more fundamental level; as being, in fact, problems of the system and not simply of details of our diets. The comment that we should eat ‘lower down the food chain’, quoted here from Compassion in World Farming but an often-repeated concept, is instructive.205 It seems to express far more than that people in the West should eat different animals, or that farmers should feed them differently; rather, it calls for a significant shift in the way we view food consumption in the developed world, and indeed the food consumption of the middle class in the developing world.

These two levels to the problems and suggested solutions for food – one an essentially technical problem, responsive to changes implemented within the current system, and the other at the systemic level – reflect the debates around many issues in climate change. For many green campaigners, the worst insult you can level at any suggested action is to call it a ‘techno-fix’; that is, a putative solution to a climate change problem which tries to achieve its aims without changing how the system which caused the problem works in any meaningful way. The most obvious techno-fix proposals of recent years are things like the space mirrors or reflective dust which the US recommended to the IPCC in 2007,²⁰⁶ but the concept is not restricted to the outlandish. The techno-fix is any measure which changes the technology rather than the system which uses it, whether that technological change is the replacement of petrol with biofuels or coal-fired power stations with wind turbines. The argument is that any such technological changes are an attempt to ‘decouple’ production from the ecological damage it causes, and there is considerable debate about whether that would be possible, or whether positing that it might be possible to have production without its material consequences is simply an attempt by interested parties to maintain the status quo.²⁰⁷

In the context of the arguments around food, advising people to eat less meat, or at least to eat chicken instead of beef, may not seem a very technical techno-fix, but it can be seen as a solution on that level. The suggestion for example that food scientists could develop ‘fake’ beef and other meats, so that people did not have to lose their taste for them, does demonstrate a line of thinking which looks to scientific solutions rather than system changes.208 The alternative is to see damage to the ecosystem caused by food as part of the system of food production, so that change also has to happen at that systemic level: changing the system, rather than tinkering with it, as the techno-fix tries to do. This latter is an approach taken by much of the literature discussed here about food and climate change, and fits the issues of food into a much wider, long-standing debate about overconsumption and its effects on the planet.

In this respect, the natural limits which appear in debates about food and climate change are not simply the limit to the amount of food which can be produced on the planet, but an expression of the fragility of the biosphere as a whole. Climate change here is not just a factor in setting limits to food production, by for example making it inadvisable to clear forests to create more agricultural land, but is evidence that the natural limits are already being breached. The argument is that our consumption levels are such that we are failing to live within our environmental means. As far as food is concerned, the evidence that consumption of ‘inefficient’ foods in the First World has a direct linear relationship with hunger and poverty in the Third World is not actually particularly good. A computer model developed by Compassion in World Farming found that a 50% shift by Western consumers to less resource-intensive food would reduce childhood malnutrition in the developing world by a measly 2.8% by 2020.²⁰⁹ However, the assumption remains that global consumption is a zero sum game, in which a fair share would be distinctly less than the abundance associated with the West: ‘the overconsumption of the billion or so who consume far more than their basic needs and, it is reasonable to assume, contribute directly or indirectly to the underconsumption of the impoverished billion’.210

It is this definition of the problem with food as one of Western consumer behaviour which makes the connection between food and overconsumption more generally. The idea that modern Western societies in general, and individuals within them, consume too much is frequently a given in discussions of environmental problems. Anyone reading broadsheet media in the UK probably encounters it several times a week. Because it has become an accepted truth in many circles, its intellectual origins are often not explained, but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have them. The idea that consumption is problematic has a considerable pedigree.

Overconsumption and the steady state

The argument that overconsumption is particularly problematic takes its inspiration among others from John Kenneth Galbraith, in his 1958 work The Affluent Society.²¹¹ Galbraith argued that the unfettered growth which he saw the US government pursuing in the 1950s was not beneficial for society and, despite statements to the contrary, did not alleviate poverty. In his 1976 introduction to the third edition, he explained how the question of poverty in areas like the mountains of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee was his inspiration for the work, for which his working title was ‘Why People Are Poor’,²¹² and how it was intended as a refutation of the ‘trickle down’ theory beloved of post-Second World War free market economic thinkers. Although he had been a Keynesian in the 1930s and 1940s, after the Second World War Galbraith saw other Keynesians adopting what he saw as an obsession with production for the sake of production, and a theory of constant economic growth which had the effect of starving public services while building up private wealth for the few. If, he argued, production was no longer treated as an unequivocal good to which all other interests could be sacrificed, society could develop ‘a more relaxed and compassionate view of output without putting individuals to hardship’213; a world with shorter working hours, lower unemployment and better public services.

Since Galbraith wrote this, such ideas about the undesirability of continuous economic growth have become important for thinking about environmental problems, underlying for example the steady state theory. This theory, developed by Herman Daly, views economic growth as the structural problem that causes environmental damage. Using John Stewart Mill’s theory that the economy would expand to a certain point and then stop in a ‘stationary state’,²¹⁴ it theorises an economy with a stable size, neither growing nor going into recession, with constant stocks of labour and of capital, so that apparently the flows of goods and services produced would also be constant. Economic development, in the sense of change in what was produced or the way in which it was done, could still occur, but it would be change rather than growth, since in this theory, the constant labour and capital stocks would prevent it.²¹⁵ Because such a society would have limited production and population, the theory holds that its effect on the environment would also be limited. While manmade capital used to be the limiter for growth, henceforth it would be natural capital.²¹⁶ In fact, society would have to live within its natural means to avoid further environmental harm, tracked by, for example, the concept of ‘ecological debt’ developed by Andrew Simms.²¹⁷

Economic growth in this discussion is so malign because it can only be achieved through increases in production and consumption, with all the depletion of natural resources and environmental damage that entails. The steady state theorists are not necessarily anti-capitalists: Herman Daly was a World Bank advisor, and he and others were at pains to stress that the trappings of capitalism could continue, imagining for example a steady state with a stock market.218 The problem of how the capitalist system could work without growth is therefore a real problem. One suggestion is that material production could be replaced with capitalist economies based on providing services, which in this idea would not have the same material effects on the environment, but not everyone agrees that this decoupling would be possible. Daly himself was sceptical about the idea that labour could replace material inputs in production, pointing out that if you’re building a house and you run out of wood, you can’t make up for it by hiring more carpenters. When Tim Jackson reviewed the material/immaterial production problem in his 2009 Prosperity without Growth?, he concluded that ‘the capitalist model provides no easy route to the steady state’.²¹⁹

Whether or not it is believed that immaterial services could replace the economic effect of material production, it remains the case that for these theorists, material production and consumption is the source of our environmental woes, just as for Galbraith it was the cause of social and economic problems. Production and consumption are obviously connected as two parts of the same process: production without consumption would be distinctly unprofitable, whereas consumption without production would quickly run out of things to consume. However, identifying the process as the cause of ecological destruction necessitates also identifying which out of production and consumption is the key driver of it.

For the writers on the steady state, it is consumption which is clearly the most important side of the equation, with recent works treating it rather than production as key to issues of economic growth and environmental problems.²²⁰ This is in line with general received wisdom that consumption drives production: consumers conceive a need for products, and so the market provides them. As any marketing textbook will tell you, the way to a profitable business is to ‘determine the needs, wants and values’ of your target market, and develop products to satisfy them. Producing the products you want, then cajoling unwilling consumers to buy them, is not a highly-regarded strategy. Despite the all-pervading nature of this assumption, it isn’t necessarily correct. Marx for example argued strongly that despite bourgeois economists’ views, production leads consumption, not the other way around. Workers’ ability to consume is important to the capitalists producing the items for their consumption, but the production is not created by their demand, which in fact would never be sufficient to generate profits from production.221

Galbraith was not a Marxist, and his attitude towards Marxism is difficult to interpret, summed up as it is in the immensely quotable but bizarre comment that ‘the man who argues with a Marxist has always been assaulting a rock fortress with a rubber flail’.²²² He does however seem to have agreed with Marx on the relation of production to consumption, stating that ‘production only fills a void that it itself has created’²²³; in other words, that advertising created consumer wants which would not otherwise have existed in order to sell what capitalists chose to produce. His argument was that production, and ever-increasing production, was not naturally pre-ordained, as he thought some contemporary commentators perceived it. He saw the excuse that ‘it would damage production’ being used to deny more public spending on health, education, public infrastructure and other elements of social welfare, and the main goal of The Affluent Society was to argue that this pre-occupation with production was both harmful and unnecessary.

As a result, the solutions put forward by Galbraith were largely policy ones, like shorter working hours, more public works and higher taxes. In contrast, arguments since around the problem of overconsumption have tended to focus on consumption-related solutions, on the assumption that if consumer demand changes, production with all its environmental consequences will automatically follow. This has meant that they have had to examine consumption in some detail. The steady state as an economic theory can to some extent treat all consumption as one category, but if we are setting out to reduce consumer demand for products, this demand has to be subdivided. It is clear that for these arguments some consumption is much more problematic than others. Further, not all consumers are the same. An argument which on one level seems to approach consumption from all sections of society as potentially the same seems on closer inspection to be very concerned about the class of consumers under consideration.

Consuming and class

Galbraith himself is vague on the question of his definition of consumption, nor does he clarify which class he is imagining doing the consuming. It is fairly clear that consumption for Galbraith is consumer consumption as might be understood in the general, popular sense: buying the products of new technologies. The modern object of this consumption would be iPhones, LCD TVs and laptops; in a 1950s context, we should probably imagine more items of household equipment like fridges and vacuum cleaners, and, of course, cars. Galbraith’s discussion of the irrationality of consumer wants, spurred on by advertising, conjures a familiar image of ‘must have’ products which fits very well with a modern understanding of consumer consumption as indulgence in products which, while pleasant and desirable, are unnecessary for life.224 But this also raises the question of the identity of the consumers.

The question of class and consumption is a complex one. While at its basic level, consumption of ‘consumer’ goods like high-end electronic gadgets implies a certain level of material wealth, there are also common ideas which single out working-class consumption and which imply that consumption of consumer goods is as much a working-class as it is a middle-class behaviour. For example, as we’ve seen, a familiar and egregious argument criticises working-class people for consumer consumption, either for wasting their dole money on widescreen TVs and Sky subscriptions, or complaining that if they can find the resources to acquire TVs and Playstations, they can’t really be poor. It’s an idea at the heart of the neo-liberal view that there is no such thing as poverty in the developed world, as set out for example by Margaret Thatcher in 1978: ‘Nowadays there really is no primary poverty left in this country. In Western countries we are left with the problems which aren’t poverty. All right, there may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character-personality defect.’225

This has particular application to children, with the concept being that middle-class parents know how to educate their kids while working-class parents simply pacify them with computer games and expensive trainers, and carries with it the understanding that anything consumed by working-class people becomes devalued in middle-class eyes. However, these are essentially criticisms of working-class people attaining access to goods that might once have been restricted only to the middle classes. They do not contradict the fundamental point that consumers are those who have the resources to be able to consume, and the more expensive the goods under discussion as problematic consumption, the wealthier the consumers are likely to be.

Galbraith’s picture of private wealth and public poverty seems in places to imply truly serious wealth, so the impression is that the articles of problematic consumption would be luxury limos and heated swimming pools, with possibly a new vacuum cleaner for the maids. However, he may have had consumption by much poorer consumers in mind. In the introduction to the original edition of The Affluent Society, Galbraith said that society was living with economic and social ideas developed in a world where poverty was the norm, and the challenge was to adapt them to a new world where most people were affluent.226 In light of this statement, the problematic consumption under discussion in the book would not be the consumption of the wealthy elite, who had existed in the previous world of general poverty, but of the newly un-impoverished majority. The US in the 1950s saw a great increase in the accessibility of consumer goods to working people. It seems that the consumption Galbraith was talking about was not so much that of the wealthy per se, but the threat that behaviours once limited to the wealthy were becoming available to the wider population. The similarities between this and the current arguments about middle-class Indians and Chinese adopting Western diets are not coincidental.

The key idea here is that of unnecessary consumption: consumption which the previously-impoverished workers engaging in it might not recognise as such, but which is damaging to their long term interests if it holds back the development of public services and keeps them working long hours to earn the wages to afford it. Galbraith effectively divided the consumption of ordinary Americans into two categories: that of their basic needs, and luxuries, many of which in his opinion they did not really need. This was not a distinction invented by Galbraith himself, but while he probably was not influenced directly by Marx, the division he makes is reflective of Marx’s discussion of workers’ consumption.

Definitions of consumption

Marx points out that the absolute lower limit for wages is the cost of reproduction of labour. If workers don’t earn enough to support themselves and their families, this not only leads to misery for them but impedes the development of the next generation of workers, so it is ultimately necessary for the capitalist to ensure that their workers’ children are minimally, if not particularly well, fed. However, Marx also points out that in practice it is not always possible for employers to keep wages at the level of simple reproduction, so workers were sometimes able not only to increase their consumption of necessities, but also ‘enjoy momentarily articles of luxury ordinarily beyond [their] reach, and those articles which at other times constitute for the great part consumer “necessities” only for the capitalist class’.227

This point was later developed by Rosa Luxemburg, when she described how workers’ struggles can achieve not only the momentary increases in living standards described by Marx, but also advances in the customary standard of living above the physical minimum for survival. In this way, successive struggles can establish a cultural and social standard of living, below which wages cannot fall without provoking severe resistance, and which can become accepted by employers as a de facto minimum wage level.²²⁸ An example of this process could be seen in the way in which consumer goods like fridges and televisions have become progressively more accessible to working people over the last fifty years, going from luxuries, to necessities, to items which are assumed to be part of a basic standard of living. The disparaging comments sometimes levelled at working-class possession of such items as showing that they are ‘not really poor’ can be seen as railing against the process identified by Luxemburg. Certainly, attempts to reduce wages to a level at which a fridge would be an unaffordable luxury would be met with considerable resistance in most industries.

As the result of successful workers’ struggles, the advance of the customary standard of living can be seen as a defeat for the capitalist class, in that it makes it more difficult for them to reduce wages below a certain level. However, while it might mean that employers incur a higher wages bill, it would also be a boon for the fridge manufacturers, since everyone else’s workers would provide a new market for their fridges. Marx points out that to the capitalist, the total mass of workers excluding his own appear as consumers: since capitalists always regard wages as a loss, rather than a gain, the unachievable ideal for any given employer would be for everyone else’s workers to be generously paid, but for the wages of his own to be held at the basic level of reproduction.229 The credit bubble which burst in 2008 is illustrative of an attempt to get closer to this capitalist nirvana, as corporations shifted jobs to parts of the world where wages were low, while credit substituted for earnings in enabling workers in the First World to continue to provide a market for consumer goods.

It will be apparent from this discussion that for Marx, articles of production were divided into two categories, according to how they are consumed, or not, by the workers.²³⁰ The first category he called ‘articles of consumption’, comprising items required to fulfil the workers’ basic needs, while in the second category were the ‘articles of luxury’ to which the workers could only sometimes win access. In the light of the debates about overconsumption, it’s important to note that for Marx, the definition of basic needs was not set by experts, bourgeois opinion or research into human physical requirements, but by workers themselves. His definition of workers’ basic requirements was those items without which workers themselves would feel unable to live. His comment on items of which some modern commentators might question the necessity was that they were included in the category of articles of consumption ‘regardless of whether such a product as tobacco is really a consumer necessity from the physiological point of view. It suffices that it is habitually such.’²³¹

As we have seen,²³² Marx was scathing about the ideas circulating in the nineteenth century of the desirability of restraint and self-denial for the workers; the argument that they should limit their consumption as far as they could and hence build up savings: ‘Society today makes the paradoxical demand that he for whom the object of exchange is subsistence should deny himself, not he for whom it is wealth’.233 He pointed out that this demand was effectively that the workers should limit anything in their lives which did not consist of working, and hence generating more surplus value for the capitalist. They should ‘maintain themselves as pure labouring machines’ and even build up enough savings to pay for their own wear and tear.²³⁴ In contrast to this, ‘the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste etc, [is] his only share of civilisation which distinguishes him from the slave’.²³⁵ From the point of view of modern ideas of the unnecessary and frivolous nature of much consumption, this might appear a list of rather highbrow pursuits, but that was clearly not how it was meant. These were activities in which workers might participate if they were able, and which, we might note, may have seemed devalued in middle-class culture had sufficient numbers of workers managed to do so.

The difference between Marx and Galbraith on this is that for Marx, workers’ consumption, when possible, of the articles of luxury usually denied them, was also an unalloyed good thing, while for Galbraith, it was not only the source of social problems but the result of consumer desires which they did not really feel. Although for Galbraith, production was not demand-led, he clearly did view the ability of many working people to access things from Marx’s second category of ‘articles of luxury’ as a problem. Rather than improving their living standards in the way that Marx described, Galbraith felt that some needs for consumer goods were unreasonable and undiscerning: the consumers did not distinguish between important needs and minor whims and did not know what they really wanted.²³⁶

The idea of unnecessary, ill-considered consumption has clearly been an extremely influential one, even as the definition of consumption has developed. Some of the more recent discussions of overconsumption have adopted Galbraith’s understanding of consumption as consumer consumption; so, for example, the World Wildlife Fund’s 2008 report on the environmental movement discusses motivating pro-environmental consumption in terms of consumer decisions specifically to buy a hybrid car rather than an SUV, and with a general focus on electricity use and electronic goods.237 Whether consciously or not, this follows Galbraith’s definition of the nature of problematic consumption as an issue of articles of luxury, as Marx defined them, and not articles of basic consumption. However, in much of the literature on overconsumption, the definition of excessive consumption has clearly changed.

The changing face of overconsumption

One of the earlier recent writers on overconsumption to look at the different possible definitions of consumption was Paul Stern. In a paper published in 1997, he outlined the popular definition of consumer consumption as ‘the purchase decisions of households and what they do with their purchases’, associated with problems like plastic waste, traffic, consumerism, advertising and shopping malls.²³⁸ This is clearly the consumption of articles of luxury as criticised by Galbraith, although the definition outlined by Stern changes the focus from the act of producing the articles for consumer consumption, as in Galbraith, to their packaging and distribution. It is difficult to identify why Stern put the definition in precisely this way, but it is possible that he was reflecting a general sense that, as in the food miles arguments, the problem was not with the items themselves, but the system of industrialised production and globalised markets. In any event, the popular understanding of consumption seemed insufficient to Stern, who argued for a much more far-reaching definition, which would, he argued, enable people to appreciate human effects on the biosphere: ‘human and human-induced transformation of materials and energy’.239

This definition clearly moved consumption out of the realm of articles of luxury and opened the concept of overconsumption to any form of consumption at all. Stern’s definition does not single out the basic needs category of consumption; his principal target in arguing that the consumer definition of consumption is too narrow appears to be the public sector and, by extension, other non-domestic consumption.²⁴⁰ However, this is not true of subsequent definitions of consumption. Thomas Princen, for example, followed Stern in adopting an environmental definition of consumption, but felt that Stern equated consumption erroneously with materialism.²⁴¹ His ‘ecological’ definition of overconsumption – ‘consumption which undermines a species’ life support system’²⁴² – is actually quite similar to Stern’s, but his comments on the consequences of this definition demonstrate the direction in which the overconsumption arguments were moving.

For Princen, consumption over basic needs is always harmful. Galbraith thought that consumers could not always tell when they really wanted something; Princen implies effectively that they should never want anything at all. He identifies a goal of policy-making to identify instances where individuals were harming themselves and the environment, because these should be the easiest behaviours to change: ‘win-win, no regrets policies that simultaneously produce improved human welfare and reduce ecological risk to humans’ life support system’.²⁴³ These opportunities would seem to be legion, as Princen ends the article with the comment that the world could ‘re-embrace such notions as thrift, frugality and self reliance’.²⁴⁴ It is clear that if Princen did not consider his definition of overconsumption to include basic needs, those basic needs were defined pretty narrowly, without much room for those items which, although not physiologically necessary, are habitually considered such.

Princen is one of the most overtly right-wing of the recent writers on overconsumption, as shown by his argument that social change to address climate change was possible because ‘if former communists can embrace free markets’, anything can happen.245 His vision of a society of self-reliant individuals is a far cry from Galbraith’s plea for better funding for public services. However, while the packaging of his arguments may be different, Princen was not an outlier but firmly part of the development of the definition of overconsumption. It is clear from the most recent literature on overconsumption that the increasingly-accepted definition is one which can include food. This is demonstrated, for example, by Alcott’s 2008 explanation of the ‘sufficiency strategy’, a plan for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and living within humanity’s resources, in food terms. Achieving reductions in emissions by increasing efficiency is, he says, like not overfilling the kettle when making coffee. However, sufficiency means not having the cup of coffee at all.²⁴⁶

The coffee in this analogy would certainly have been included within Marx’s definition of basic needs. It may not be strictly physiologically necessary for life, but it can seem so, particularly first thing in the morning. The fact that Alcott could use food-related consumption as his parable for the entire sufficiency strategy is a striking indication of how the definition of overconsumption shifted from Galbraith’s understanding of consumer consumption of luxury articles to include elements of basic needs. He also explicitly includes some foods in a list of ‘common ostensive definitions of dispensable or at least negotiable consumption’: large houses, air travel, SUVs, cosmetics and meat.²⁴⁷

Alcott does not explain the basis on which these particular things are regarded as overconsumption. The arguments against air travel and SUVs are clear on greenhouse gas emission grounds, and large houses could be included in this on the basis of increased energy required for heat and light, although this is more an issue of insulation, choice of heating system and turning lights off than of square footage itself. This would imply that meat is included in the list on the grounds of its high emissions and inefficiency in terms of cereal and water use, as discussed above. Its equation in this way with air travel and SUVs is demonstrative of its high place in the chart of climate damagers, ahead, for example, of ordinary cars and lorries. However, the inclusion of cosmetics in the list of overconsumption implies that greenhouse gas emissions are not the only factor being used here to find items of consumption worthy or unworthy.

The cosmetics industry, while not especially low in emissions, is also not associated with high greenhouse gas emissions in comparison with production of other marketed, packaged products. Its inclusion in a list which does not also include things like TVs and mobile phones makes little sense, if this is indeed a list of the worst-emitting forms of consumption. However, it could be argued that cosmetics are not necessary for life, and might seem to someone who (presumably) does not use them as easier to dispense with than other sources of emissions, the lack of which might seem to have a more significant effect on lifestyle. In this light, Alcott’s list of items of dispensable consumption seems not to be a list of products whose particularly high emissions make them especially unsustainable, but a selection, from the wide category of items whose consumption causes greenhouse gas emissions, of those things which he thinks we don’t need. Thus the definition of overconsumption here still effectively excludes basic needs, but basic needs as externally defined; not, as in Marx, defined by those doing the consuming.

Implicit in the concept of unnecessary consumption is the idea that some consumption can be actively harmful, not only to the planet, but to the consumers themselves. Writers on overconsumption have sought to develop the idea that cutting consumption would be in the direct interest of consumers, as less consumption would make us happier. This is sometimes presented as if an argument for ‘downshifting’: we work long hours so as to be able to afford consumer goods, and could choose to work less and have less.248 However, in the most recent overconsumption works, this increasingly becomes an argument about food.

Food seems to provide a particularly clear example of the personal dangers of overconsumption and the benefits of cutting down. Dauvergne, for example, explains his definition of ‘wasteful consumption and overconsumption’ purely in food terms, as ‘consumption with no benefits for well-being, such as overeating until obese’.²⁴⁹ Simms also uses food as an argument for reducing consumption, citing Second World War rationing as an example of how, by following Ministry of Food encouragement to ‘Grow fit not fat on your war diet’ and ‘Cut out extras, cut out waste, don’t eat more than you need’, ‘people did indeed become fitter and healthier and consumption of resources was drastically cut.’²⁵⁰ This may be a rather simplified view of the effect of rationing on population health in 1939-45, since it disregards the effect of rationing not only in cutting the consumption of the better-off, but in actually improving the diets of the poor.²⁵¹ The idea that the chief diet-related problem in the UK in the 1930s was overeating is arguable, to say the least. However, this does reflect a common belief in the overconsumption literature about modern Western diets.

As Jackson comments in his 2009 report: ‘When the American fridge freezer is already stuffed with overwhelming choice, a little extra might be considered a burden, particularly if you’re tempted to eat it’.²⁵² This analogy for the benefits of cutting consumption clearly equates food, or modern, Western food, with the consumer consumption symbolised by the fridge. As an ‘American fridge freezer’, this is clearly supposed to be unnecessarily oversized and stuffed with food of which much will presumably be thrown away uneaten. While this is partly an argument about waste – there would be less risk of waste if the fridge were smaller and had less food in it – it’s interesting that eating the food is presented here as the worst of the possible outcomes. Food consumption here has not only become consumer consumption, but among different types of overconsumption potentially the most serious kind. This is so much so that for some writers, overconsuming food can stand in for overconsuming anything else, as it is the major category. Clive Hamilton, for example, begins the chapter on overconsumption in his 2004 Growth Fetish with a discussion of obesity.253

The increasing prominence of food within overconsumption provides a theoretical backdrop for the specific arguments about food and its effect on climate change. It is a clear context for arguments that the solution to climate change lies in dietary changes by those who are judged to be overconsuming. So, for example, the drastic reductions in meat-eating called for by the Food Climate Action Network are included within general cuts in food consumption to what is clearly meant to be a basic needs level. The report recommends reducing alcohol, sweets and chocolate on the basis that they are ‘unnecessary foods – they are not needed in our diet’ and calls for us to monitor quantities as well as qualities of food consumption: ‘do not eat more than you need to maintain a healthy body weight’.²⁵⁴ They also make explicit the generally implicit shift in the overconsumption literature from a Marxist definition of items of basic needs to one set by external experts, as the report calls for a shift from a ‘demand orientated’ to a ‘needs orientated’ approach to food.²⁵⁵ We might, after all, demand alcohol and chocolate, but the expert judge could point out that we do not physiologically need them. What is not explored in works like the Food Climate Action Network report, but is clearly important to the whole debate about food and climate change, is how the identification of overconsumption with food has changed who the overconsumers might be.

As discussed above, the groups in the frame for overdoing non-food, consumer consumption are those who have the material resources to afford it. For Galbraith, the urgent consumption problem of the 1950s may have been not so much middle-class consumption itself, but the increasing ability of working people to command sufficient resources to engage in it; yet this does not change the essentially middle-class identification of the behaviour. It is clear that more recent discussions of overconsumption in terms of consumer goods would also have reasonably wealthy people in mind. The idea of the harmful longhours culture driven by consumer spending, for example, is only really applicable to those who are able to command high salaries for their long hours. If people have to work 60-hour weeks because of low pay, exhorting them to cut their hours and forgo their extra foreign holidays is not likely to have much effect. However, if problematic overconsumption is defined as ‘eating until obese’, the group responsible becomes different. Overconsumption is no longer about middle-class people competing for status through fancy cars and LCD TVs, it’s about working-class people eating.

As we have seen, criticisms of working-class people’s diets often take the form of encouraging them to eschew fast food in favour of healthier choices, so a defender of the conclusion that overconsumption is fundamentally a problem of working-class food consumption could argue that this is only highlighting the need for a change which would benefit working-class people themselves. The problem with this putative defence is that any argument which concludes that working-class people as a group are eating more than their share of the world’s resources and are therefore the root of our ecological crisis is attacking them at a pretty existential level. After all, we need to eat to exist, not something which applies to earlier, higher-class definitions of overconsumption. It is also relevant that the identification of overconsumption as working-class food consumption has not developed in a vacuum. The idea that the consumption of the poor is problematic is not a new one, but one which has a long and inglorious history.