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Writer and thinktank founder Chandran Nair says billions of Chinese and Indians may aspire to an American standard of living, but it will be a catastrophe if these aspirations are met Chandran Nair is a softspoken man with a radical message. Listening to his hard-hitting analysis, it’s not easy to know whether we are hearing a brave pioneer or a voice crying in the wilderness. His call to arms is clear: a western model of development has dominated the world for the last 60 years, but it will be disastrous if it is allowed to continue unreformed in Asia. Consumption-led economic growth is the orthodoxy that runs the global system. Billions of Chinese and Indians may aspire to an American standard of living, but it will be a catastrophe if such aspirations are ever fulfilled. Across Asia there is now unprecedented pressure on environmental resources such as water, fish, forestry and air quality. Nair’s conclusion is blunt: Asia must develop a new model of capitalism – he calls it constrained capitalism – which limits the use of natural resources and inhibits the behaviour of consumers. “It’s a matter of numbers,” Nair said on a visit to London to speak at the Royal Society of Arts . “What Europe and America does about restricting its impact on the environment is pretty irrelevant. The future will be determined by what happens in Asia. Three billion Asians want what you and I have, but there is not enough to go round. By 2050, there will be 5 billion Asians,” says Nair, who grew up in Malaysia and now lives in Hong Kong. “If Asia continues like the west, the game is over; as people in Asia get richer, they eat further up the food chain. If 500 million Chinese want to eat just one seafood meal a week, it will empty all the seas of Asia. If Asians ate as much chicken as Americans, by 2050 that would amount to 120 billion birds a year instead of today’s 16 billion. To aspire to the western model in Asia is a deadly lie. “If China and India had the levels of car ownership evident across the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], that would amount to 1.5bn more cars – and it would take the entire oil production of Saudi Arabia to run them,” says Nair, whose book Consumptionomics : Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet has just been published. Yet this is the reality that Asians are reluctant to face. Western car manufacturers want to sell cars to Asia, and Asia wants to buy them. No Asian chief executive is prepared to talk publicly about the need for consumer constraint. Only privately, says Nair, will senior government officials and business figures agree that the arguments he makes is crucial to Asia’s future – and has relevance for every part of the developing world. Could Asia offer Africa, for example, an alternative model of development? “Governments need to tell their people that they can’t have everything,” says Nair. “The dream of a lifestyle commensurate with US sitcoms needs to be deconstructed immediately.” Nair has a distinguished career in running the biggest environmental consultancy in Asia, based in Hong Kong, so he has the ear of powerful business interests – but it’s perhaps his background as an activist in the African National Congress in southern Africa in the early 1980s that is standing him in good stead in taking on accepted orthodoxy. Part of Asia’s current predicament, argues Nair, is that for too long it has accepted a western intellectual dominance. Many of the brightest go off to western business schools and universities to be inculcated in the virtues of the free market. Nair set up a thinktank in Hong Kong to begin to develop Asian strategies rather than continue to follow western strictures on what development looked like and on how to run their economies. Twice in the last 15 years, Nair points out, the west has lectured or hectored Asian nations to follow its rules – first, in the IMF’s intervention in the disastrous financial crisis of the late 90s, and second, after the 2008 financial crisis when the US urged the Chinese to consume more – and become more like Americans. Nair even cites an IMF workshop in 2009 in Beijing on how to “catalyse household consumption” – effectively subverting existing systems of consumer constraint. On both occasions, the western intervention has been deeply resented, imposing western-style solutions. But Nair reserves most scorn for the west’s mythology about Asian growth. Yes, millions have been lifted out of poverty but rather than putting this down as a triumph of liberal market capitalism, Nair argues that the model of development has consigned many millions more to continuing abject poverty. Trickle down doesn’t work. Consumption-led growth creates a comparatively small middle class floating nervously in a sea of poverty. Its a cruel illusion to claim that the poor can all one day join the middle classes. Even if 250 million join the middle classes – with all the disastrous consequences that will have on environmental resources – in the next 20 years, that will leave 3 billion still in poverty. “This is my key point. The majority of Asians are being left behind by the current model of growth, and governments will have to change tack or risk losing legitimacy,” argues Nair. He challenges the development model of rapid urbanisation and calls instead for investment in rural areas to improve sustainable farming methods and raise farming incomes. A policy that the Chinese have already adopted. He uses a telling fact: 2.2 billion Asians now have mobile phones, but far fewer have access to drinking water or toilets. The problem is not about needing more technology but about restructuring an economic system to meet human needs. How is it that TVs, playstations and mobile phones are more easily accessible in some of the cities of Asia than a glass of drinking water from a tap? “We live in a world whose values are set by an economic system that incentivises and rewards those who can generate growth for a select group of mostly western institutions,” states Nair in Consumptionomics. It is in the meeting of genuine human need that the future of Asian capitalism must lie: food production, environmental stewardship, and health and education. “It’s harsh for Asians to be told that as latecomers to the capitalist party they will never be able to attain that way of life taken for granted in developing countries,” he admits. What’s needed is a strong interventionist state that can take these difficult long-term decisions – Nair talks of “benign authoritarianism” and insists that the key issue is good governance, not whether it meets democratic criteria. “There is no future unless we constrain human behaviour, how you do that is the question of our time, and the region that will have to crack it is Asia. Asians will have to lead this debate.” India China Global economy Economics Madeleine Bunting guardian.co.uk