Harvard Public Health; August 28, 2024 written by Ted Alcorn
For r a growing number of American and European youth, drinking simply isn’t as cool as it once was.
Young people—increasingly aware of the myriad physical and mental health issues linked to alcohol—are shunning drinking in favor of healthier lifestyle choices. The rise of mocktails, nonalcoholic beer, and legal weed offer plenty of alternatives.
That’s encouraging for public health experts, since alcohol is one of the world’s most significant preventable causes of death: Excess drinking kills 2.6 million people each year, according to a status report the World Health Organization published in June, accounting for one in every 21 deaths worldwide.
But the alcohol industry is doing everything it can to stay relevant. In pursuit of new profit centers, booze, beer, and wine makers are marketing to demographics they’ve historically underserved, including women, and looking to new markets in the Global South, where burgeoning economies with young populations offer growth opportunities. Conveniently, many of these countries also place few or no limitations on how alcohol is sold and marketed.
During an investor meeting last year, a representative from Heineken, the Dutch brewer, said the company’s fastest-growing markets were in Asia Pacific and Africa. A slide deck titled “Africa drives global beer growth” showed the volume of Heineken sales on the continent had quadrupled in the last 20 years.
“Africa is the next frontier of growth,” Roland Pirmez, president of Heineken’s Africa, Middle East, and Eastern European region, said in a slide deck from the presentation, citing the continent’s growing population, rapid urbanization, and increasing prosperity.
Jürgen Rehm, a professor at the University of Toronto and senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, said that industry marketing had led people in Asia and Africa to begin drinking at younger ages than prior generations who had grown up with different norms and less discretionary income.
“The overall concern is that alcohol consumption is normalized globally and that a majority of the world’s adults may be drinkers 10 years from now,” Rehm wrote in an email. This result will have “serious consequences” for alcohol-related disease and economic prosperity, he said.
Heineken did not respond to questions from The Examination about these concerns.