The paper which Dr Neo Morejele co-authored deals with the issue of alcohol use as a threat to development in southern Africa  and it was published in a Swedish newspaper.

Below is an extract of the MRC's Alcohol & Drug Abuse Research Unit's Dr Neo Morejele's paper that she presented at a conference in Oslo (Norway) on Thursday 26 April and Stockholm (Sweden) on Friday 27 April. The conference was hosted by NBV-/IOGT-NTO in Sweden and FORUT in Norway.

Tomorrow, The Educational activity of the Sobriety movement, NBV, arrange Sweden’s first conference ever on the issue of alcohol and global development. Amongst the key speakers are several world leading researchers and senior officials from the World Health Organization, WHO.

WHO lists alcohol as one of “the top ten killers”. In many developing countries, alcohol is the single foremost factor causing diseases and non-natural death. Alcohol is also a strong contributing factor to the spread of HIV/AIDS, violent crime and traffic accidents – problems that themselves causes suffering, disease and premature deaths for millions of persons in developing countries.

South Africa is a clear example of the problems caused by alcohol. People of South Africa have a general drinking habit that is ranked as most damaging to health on a four grade scale, with a high ratio of “binge drinking” (the consumption of large amounts of alcohol in one time). The same dangerous alcohol culture is also found in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, as well as in Eastern Europe, Russia and Latin America.

Alcohol’s direct effects on health are devastating. If you study South Africa’s statistics on sickness you find that HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are No. 1, that violence is No. 2, and that alcohol related diseases comes third. One out of every 25 children born in some parts of South Africa has Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, FASD. And still women drink far less alcohol than men. The alcohol addiction is extensive even among adolescents; more than every fifth South African that is treated for alcohol problems is under 20 years of age.

But the major damages of alcohol are often indirect. Alcohol contributes strongly to the spread of HIV/AIDS, one of the main reasons for this is that alcohol enhances sexual risk taking. Studies have also shown that the immune defense is weakened by alcohol, which further increases a drunken person’s risk of getting infected by HIV.

Six out of ten pedestrians and car drivers that die in South African car accidents had alcohol in their blood, a figure whose importance is highlighted by the fact that traffic accidents causes more than one third of every death among young South African youth.

The abuse of alcohol is not only contributing to an increased inclination to violence, it also implies strongly increased risks of getting exposed to violent crime. One out of seven South Africans that died as an effect of violence from a sharp item, e.g. a knife, had alcohol in their blood.

Considering this knowledge, all policy making aiming at promoting development and reducing poverty should include actions and policies that fight the negative influence of alcohol on society. However, alcohol is blatantly non-existing in discussions on poverty reduction, be it between countries like South Africa, in development organizations or in international UN programs. Sweden’s policy for global development and the Swedish Development Agency, Sida, are no exceptions. Alcohol is a blind spot in the work aiming at achieving the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goal of eradicating poverty.

Even worse is that Sweden, through the state owned company V&S Group’s brand Absolut Vodka, the world’s third largest liquor brand, actually aggravates the problem. In the book “Absolut Avslöjande” (“Absolut Unmasked”), released tomorrow, an account is given on the company’s aggressive marketing of Absolut, in development countries and elsewhere, as a western luxurious vodka brand.  The company has produced posters with texts such as “Absolut Bangkok”, “Absolut Beijing” and “Absolut Cape Town”. On some markets V&S Group evades prohibitions on alcohol marketing by using product placement and so called surrogate marketing. This is the case in India, where Absolut Vodka is marketed through exclusive clothes.

The Swedish Minister for Financial Markets, Mats Odell, recently announced that V&S Group is one of the state companies that the government aims to sell and hence make private. An alternative would be to keep the state control of the company and to use the ownership to safe guard that V&S Group acts with social responsibility in the same way as “Systembolaget” (the state owned monopolistic company that sells alcohol in Sweden) does. As long as V&S Group is owned by the state, however, Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson and Minister for Foreign Trade Sten Tolgfors have an evident responsibility to stop the unethical marketing of Absolut Vodka in the developing countries.

The Swedish government has, as owners, reasons to control that V&S Group’s interests of making profits on markets in development countries does not collide with the Swedish policy for global development.

Authors

1. Dr. Neo Morojele, Psychologist and Deputy Director of the Alcohol & Drug Abuse Research Unit, Medical Research Council, South Africa
2. Sofia Modigh, Chairman of The Educational activity of the Sobriety movement, NBV