Vital to tighten screws on alco­hol advert­ising

Alco­hol abuse is one of the clearest examples of this dynamic. It is not merely an indi­vidual beha­vi­oural issue; it is a pub­lic health, eco­nomic and social crisis that inter­sects with poverty, unem­ploy­ment, gender-based viol­ence and com­munity break­down.

It is from this under­stand­ing that the Eco­nomic Free­dom Fight­ers (EFF) has sup­por­ted stronger reg­u­la­tion of alco­hol advert­ising and why we have tabled the Liquor Amend­ment Bill in Par­lia­ment.

The World Health Organ­isa­tion states that while over­all alco­hol

Advert­ising links alco­hol to suc­cess and mas­culin­ity

con­sump­tion in South Africa is about 7.8 litres of pure alco­hol an adult a year, those who con­sume alco­hol drink an aver­age of 27.1 litres of pure alco­hol annu­ally. This trans­lates to at least six drinks a day. The pat­tern of binge drink­ing has dev­ast­at­ing con­sequences for pub­lic health and safety. A South African study estim­ated that alco­hol con­trib­utes to about 62 300 deaths a year, with nearly 60% occur­ring among poorer South Afric­ans. Alco­hol is also caus­ally linked to more than 200 dis­eases and injury con­di­tions.

Over the past 13 years, the EFF has advanced an argu­ment that free­dom without social pro­tec­tion is incom­plete.

Alco­hol-related harm is con­cen­trated in work­ing-class com­munit­ies, town­ships, informal set­tle­ments and rural areas where unem­ploy­ment is high and pub­lic ser­vices are weak. It is in these com­munit­ies that alco­hol is most aggress­ively mar­keted, cheaply access­ible and socially embed­ded as a cop­ing mech­an­ism.

Advert­ising plays a cent­ral role in nor­m­al­ising this real­ity. Alco­hol mar­ket­ing con­structs desire, shapes iden­tity and embeds con­sump­tion into cul­tural aspir­a­tion. It links alco­hol to suc­cess, mas­culin­ity, social belong­ing and escape.

In a soci­ety marked by struc­tural dis­tress, the mes­saging rein­forces cycles of con­sump­tion that gen­er­ate long-term social harm, includ­ing addic­tion, domestic viol­ence, road fatal­it­ies and intergen­er­a­tional poverty.

The Bill seeks to cor­rect the imbal­ance by strength­en­ing restric­tions on alco­hol advert­ising.

Oppos­i­tion to stronger alco­hol advert­ising restric­tions often relies on argu­ments about eco­nomic free­dom, con­sumer choice and industry con­tri­bu­tion to the eco­nomy. These argu­ments, however, ignore the power imbal­ance between cor­por­a­tions and con­sumers, par­tic­u­larly in con­texts of poverty. Choice is not free when it is shaped by tar­geted advert­ising, lim­ited eco­nomic altern­at­ives and social envir­on­ments struc­tured by lack of recre­ational options. In such con­di­tions, reg­u­la­tion becomes a safe­guard against exploit­a­tion.

As the EFF, we have insisted that policy must be eval­u­ated by its impact on the lived real­ity of the major­ity and alco­hol advert­ising is no excep­tion.

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