Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization

3 Poverty amid Prosperity

3 Poverty amid Prosperity Consumer Protest beyond the Affluent West Consumer activism is a global phenomenon. The principal organization representing consumers at the global level is Consumers International (formerly the International Organisation of Consumers Unions, or IOCU). It has over 220 members from 115 different countries and, in 2007, elected its first African President, Samuel Ochieng of the Kenyan consumer movement. Its reach stretches from the richer societies of Europe and North America to developing states across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, as well as the former Soviet bloc. Inevitably, as organized consumerism has spread throughout the world it has come across consumers with very different interests and concerns than those found in its affluent heartland. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, as consumer groups began to appear in the developing world, the organized movement had to address the needs of the poor as well as the desires of the rich. The consumer interests emerging from affluence can be very different from those emerging from necessity. Yet as a global movement that has sought to represent everybody , it is precisely these two very different constituencies that the consumer movement has sought to address. Throughout their history consumer activists have had to maintain a delicate balancing act between poverty and comfort, trading off the interests of those in the global North with those in the global South. Just as political economic considerations created one such dilemma for the consumer movement—between choice and access—so too did the movement’s growth in the developing world create new geographical frictions. In order to understand how the movement has existed across the North and the South, across East and West, it is first necessary to learn how the consumer movement emerged and spread in countries where standards of living were well below those in Europe and North America . And to do this it is instructive to turn to the experiences of consumer activists in one such country—Malaysia. This chapter begins with a case study of the Malaysian consumer activist experience in order to reflect in general on the consumer issues emerging across the developing world. As we will see, despite the clear and obvious impact Malaysian activists have had on the global consumer movement, their activities were indicative of a widespread developing world consumerism that emerged concurrently with the global community’s—principally through the United Nations—renewed commitment to third world economic development. Organized consumerism in Malaysia spearheaded developing world consumer activism, but as the final section of the chapter demonstrates, the issues it faced and campaigned on were those that came from, initially, Southeast Asia and, later, Latin America and Africa. In doing so, the problems facing the majority of the world’s consumers—access to basic needs—became a defining feature of global consumer activism. I The issues confronting consumers and consumer activists in Malaysia in the 1960s and 1970s were very different from those tackled by the national consumer organizations in Europe and North America. By the mid-1970s, the fishermen of Kuala Juru—a village (or kampung) in Province Wellesley on the Malaysian mainland—were struggling to maintain their traditional way of life. There were approximately sixty families in the village and they had for generations alternated their fishing patterns between the sea and the river itself. Yet in its desire to attract foreign investment, the Malaysian federal government had facilitated the establishment of a free trade zone across the river Juru at the Perai Industrial Estate. Disastrously for the fishermen, the effluence spewed out by the new factories resulted in the pollution of the river and the devastation of the village’s fish stocks. To exacerbate matters further, the government’s grandiose New Economic Policy (NEP) had also encouraged a number of huge investment projects designed to bring the country into the developed world. One such scheme was the North-South highway, the main route by which urban Malaysians every Hari Raya holiday rush headlong into one another in their frantic desire to escape Kuala Lumpur and return to the kampungs of their families. In order for the highway to cross the river Juru, the Tun Abdul Razak bridge was built further upstream from Kuala Juru. Unfortunately, it also served as a dam that restricted the flow of water, causing the Juru to meander and to silt at its mouth. This meant the fishermen were only able to reach their alternative inshore fish stocks at high tide and were unable to travel upstream beyond the bridge...