Current Edition >> Archives Section >> Leading Stories >> May 2002
WHILE major global trends are sweeping business into new, hitherto unknown, directions, regions like sub-Saharian Africa - including South Africa - are faced with major socio-economic adjustments. This becomes clear as detailed studies on fast-approaching major events like World Environment Day on 5 June and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg 26 August to 4 September 2002, are being scrutinized.
So for instance a report released by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) concludes that businesses that wish to survive and thrive in a global economy must respond to major social en environmental trends that are reshaping markets. Backed with facts and figures, this reports outlines 19 powerful trends that are reshaping global markets and changing the roles and strategies of corporations.
Global indicators
The publication headed Tomorrow's Markets: Global Trends and Their Implications for Business is the first that links global economic, environmental and social indicators to market development in order to help businesses better respond to future challenges. Since the world economy depends on a base of natural resources that is being severely degraded and depleted, drastically reduced consumption and waste are creating innovative new opportunities of less wasteful processes and life-enhancing goods and services. Tomorrow's Markets says that future markets will favour businesses that partner with government and civil society to serve basic needs, enhance human skills, increase economic capacity, and help remedy inequities.
Statistical trends
Among the trends statistically highlighted in Tomorrow's Markets are:
• The money spent on household consumption worldwide increased 68% between 1980 and 1998. In many developing countries, food purchases account for as much as 70% of family income.
• World energy production rose 42% between 1980 and 2000 and will sharply multiply by 2050. Renewable resources like solar and wind account for only 11.5% of current consumption.
• Over the past century, world water withdrawals increased almost as fast as population growth. Currently, 70% of freshwater withdrawals are for agriculture.
• The current addition of 60 million urban citizens a year is the equivalent of adding another Paris, Beijing, or Cairo every month.
• Today, over 400 million people use the Internet, compared with less than 20 million 5 years ago. By 2005, there will be about a billion users. However, more than half the world's peoples have never used a telephone.
• In developed countries, the working age populations will shrink from 740 million to 690 million between 2000 and 2025. In developing countries, it will increase from 3 to 4 billion people.
• There are 119 democratic states out of a total of 192 countries in 2000, as compared to 22 democratic states out of 154 countries in 1950. In 1948, only 41 governmental organizations had consultative status in the UN, now there are 2 091.
Famine in sub-Saharan Africa
Meanwhile the World Food Programme (WFP) says millions of people across southern Africa are in desperate need of food aid. The situation is particularly acute in Malawi, where over 300 000 people stare severe hunger in the face. Aid workers say the food shortages are as much to do with bad management as with lack of rain.
In Zambia, more than one million people will need emergency food this year. Another million face food shortages in Zimbabwe - a country that has traditionally been able to feed itself but is now wracked by both drought and political turmoil. The WFP says Zimbabwe may have to import between 1,5 million and 2 million tonnes of maize in 2002. Severe shortages in Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland have also come to light.
In addition the World Bank forecasts that the number of poor in sub-Saharan Africa will rise from 300 million in 1999 to 345 million people by 2015. The information also suggests that, to halve poverty in this part of the world, African economies will need to grow at an unprecedented 7% a year - more than twice the current targeted 3,1%.
Digital divide
From the above it is clear that especially the growing digital divide is a major reason for the quality of life divide currently being widening to the extremes. For instance, while a billionaire rotates around the globe as the first African in space, millions on his continent are facing imminent starvation.
How to bridge dichotomies such as these and how to respond to the sweeping global winds of change, is evidently the tremendous challenge facing Africa - as a continent, the sub-Saharian region, South Africa as a country and also provinces such as the Free State and others.
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