Posted February 2010
The empire strikes back
Alcohol policies | Will I live
to the ripe old age of 93 because I have never touched alcohol,
but have eaten lots of wholemeal bread, done my exercises and
gone to bed early? Or will I escape the Grim Reaper because I
enjoy my food and drink, don’t say no to pork crackling followed
by two vodkas, organise a large family, listen to Mozart operas
and obey the whims of our cat? The self-styled experts in the
field of alcohol research will probably underline the former,
whereas any self-respecting scientist will argue: that depends.
There are thousands of factors influencing our daily life. Yet,
again and again, anti-alcohol lobbyists grab the headlines with
findings which turn almost everybody, expect perhaps for the
fundamentalist teetotaller, into a self-abusing binge drinker
and hence a burden on society.
It would be easy to laugh at
the anti-alcohol lobby given their often arbitrary and
self-serving definitions of excess alcohol consumption. However,
alcohol producers had better be watchful this year as
anti-alcohol policies will dominate the media around the world,
following initiatives by the WHO, the EU and various national
governments aimed at clamping down on citizens who indulge in
“vice”.
The European alcohol industry
probably heaved a sigh of relief when Sweden’s six-month
rotating presidency of the EU was over at the end of December
2009. For obvious reasons, brewers and distillers had been
nervous about Sweden pushing for tougher action on
alcohol-related harm.
Surprisingly, and to the
alcohol industry’s great relief, the Swedes’ proposal did not
take as hard a line on alcohol as some had anticipated. How
come?
For decades, the Swedes had
wagged the finger at the rest of the world. From Sweden’s lofty
point of view, all governments that did not impose prohibitive
measures on alcohol consumption were lenient, not to say,
negligent of public health. Successive Swedish governments have
defended policies which aim at curbing people’s access to
alcohol tout court. It seemed as if the Nordic country’s raison
d’etat was built on the dogma of prohibition: keep people away
from the bottle and they will live happily ever after. To that
end, Sweden has maintained high taxes on alcohol, retained the
state’s alcohol retail monopoly and restricted advertising even
after the country joined the EU in 1995.
Never mind that Swedish
citizens voted with their feet and started bringing in loads of
cheap booze from Germany by way of “personal imports” as soon as
they became members of the EU, Swedish governments in what can
only be called a total denial of reality have continued to
reiterate their dogmatic stance on alcohol consumption.
But in view of the global
economic crisis, when millions of Europeans were threatened with
the loss of their jobs, even the Swedes realised during their
presidency that European governments had more important things
to worry about than putting the ills of alcohol consumption high
on their political agendas.
Perhaps it helped that
European brewers had come out with a timely study of their own
(“Swedish Alcohol Policies – an effective policy?” by the
Swedish Retail Institute, August 2009) which provided plenty of
evidence that Sweden’s own alcohol policies weren’t half as
effective as the government claimed them to be. In a clever
move, The Brewers of Europe had asked a Swedish research body to
investigate alcohol consumption. And what kind of evidence did
the Swedes come up with? Well, that currently almost thirty
percent of all beer consumed in Sweden isn’t purchased via the
official channel Systembolaget but comes into the country via
personal imports and/or smuggling. Even more sobering must have
been the finding that if unregistered alcohol consumption is
taken into account, total alcohol consumption in Sweden, as
measured in litres of pure alcohol per person, is as high as
Britain’s or Germany’s.
In other words, far from
curbing alcohol consumption, tightened restrictions on alcohol
sales in Sweden have in fact bred an underground market for
bootleg alcohol. What makes matters worse is that the
availability of alcohol to young people is greater than ever.
Although you have to be 20 years of age to purchase alcohol
legally, few youngsters seem to have any problem buying alcohol
these days. Just go and look for a kiosk which sells the stuff
from under the counter or find some old age pensioner who runs a
racket of bringing cheap booze into the country which he then
flogs off to friends and family.
No, we are not blinkered
These research results may
have come as a surprise to the Swedish government – which
immediately robustly dismissed them - but they did not in the
least astound me. All the people I know in Sweden have stacks of
imported alcohol sitting in their garden sheds. Not only that,
all of them claim to have access to (or even own) equipment to
produce moonshine, or what the locals call
“skogsstjärnan”("forest star" referring to the stars on brandy
bottles). Now, if I were to make an extrapolation on my
anecdotal evidence, I ought to conclude … – no, I won’t.
Still, Sweden issued a
statement at the end of its EU presidency which calls upon
national governments to implement the EU alcohol strategy with
renewed vigour, thus underlining Sweden’s long-held conviction
that only by raising the legal drinking age, by banning alcohol
advertising, increasing excise and placing warning labels on
alcohol containers could Europe's bad drinking habits be curbed.
The alcohol debate in Europe,
if I were to sum it up, has been dominated by shrill polemics,
dodgy statistics and funny findings for years. Dominated by the
Nordic countries and the UK, the debate has been fuelled by
cash-strapped governments that want to disguise fiscal greed as
public good; by reformers, improvers and other dogmatic
do-gooders, who, secure in their belief in their monopoly on
virtue, have set their eyes on alcohol and sugar as the “new
tobacco”; and finally by the media itself, which knows only too
well that jazzed up stories on alcohol sell well.
As a consequence, the alcohol
debate has been going round and round in circles. For
propagandistic purposes, theories have been rehashed, which have
never really rung true. And as time goes by they stand even less
of a chance of passing the reality test. But who cares? And who
is to complain?
What galls me, and presumably
a fair number of our readers too, is the chutzpah displayed by
the “bring-down-consumption-by-all-means”-faction when it comes
to blanking out all evidence that could call their claims into
question.
Out of sight out of mind
Take beer advertising and
alcohol consumption. Again and again brewers have had to defend
themselves against the accusation that it just takes one look at
a glossy beer ad and all of us will start salivating for the
real stuff. However, things are not as simple as that. Look at
Germany, Europe’s major beer market. Although total advertising
spent on beer has ranged between EUR 350 million and EUR 400
million per year for the past decade or so, beer consumption has
gone down: from 130 litres per capita in 1998 to 110 litres in
2009. What are we allowed to conclude? That consumption is not
only determined by the level of advertising consumers are
exposed to? Exactly. Eastern Germany is another case in point.
During communist times, Eastern German breweries did not
advertise at all. Yet beer consumption stood at 143 litres per
capita in 1988 – the year before the Wall came down.
This sort of data should give
every public health advocate reason to pause. Yet what do they
do instead? They hammer home the point that advertisements for
booze are to be blamed if people drink too much.
I am afraid you have to be a
subscriber to
www.brauweltinternational.com to read the rest of this
report.
▲
Archiv
november
09
· october 09
· july
09
· june
09
· march 09
· january 09
·
november 08
·
october 08
·
august 08
·
june 08
·
april
08
◄
