Consumer policymakers
and commentators have been all too willing pay lip-service to the four basic
consumer rights as proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The right to
safety, to be informed, to choose and to be heard are the central tenets of the
consumer movement. Yet, few have sought to clarify or question what the rights
mean and how they might be extended. When the United Nations added an
additional four guidelines in 1985: the right to the satisfaction of basic
needs, to redress, to education, and to a healthy environment, there was
little, if any, debate about how competing consumer rights were to be balanced
against each other.
The final right
– the right to a healthy environment – was aimed at improving the environmental
impact of production; to protect local communities, particularly in the
developing world, from factory emissions and other pollutants. More recently
advocates have promoted the idea of ‘sustainable consumption’: switching to
‘green power’, recycling and reducing packaging in an effort to reduce harm to
the environment. However, there has not been a sustained effort to question the
overall ideology of consumption and to reign in the excesses of unlimited
choice. How is the ‘right to the satisfaction of basic needs’, for example, to
be balanced with the ‘right to a healthy environment’? The pursuit of
prosperity dependent on mass consumption is not based on ‘the satisfaction of basic
needs’. Mass consumption has delivered benefits to a privileged few but has
left much of the world’s population in poverty. The environmental costs of mass
production and consumption have been horrendous. The ‘race to the bottom’ in an
effort to serve consumer choice benefits very few – and it certainly does not
serve the long-term interests of consumers regardless of where they live.
Whose interests
does the pursuit of unlimited consumer choice serve (whose liberty is curbed by
restricting the number of toothbrushes available in the local supermarket)? The
consumer policy framework that predicates access and choice has proved to be
ineffective at dealing with problems even when there has been willingness to do
so. It is not so much that the framework is out dated but that policymakers
have forgotten the historical foundations on which it was built. A system that
is only interested in access and individual choice has little hope of spreading
benefits widely and strengthening democracy.
It is not enough
to offer consumers more choices in the form of alternative or sustainable
consumption – these are too easily co-opted by marketers all too willing sell
the alternatives. Policymakers must encourage consumers to also exercise the
ultimate choice – the right to say no. Alongside self-sufficiency (intentional
poverty) ‘Not Buying’ is a serious alternative to the culture of consumption.
