How Microbrew Can Save the World

By Chris O'Brien, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted October 25, 2006.

The world's cup runneth over with living beer traditions. But this vast repository of cultural brewing capital is under attack by global corporations. The top five brewing companies, all of which are American- or European-owned, control 41 percent of the world market. Perversely, economists and politicians calculate the conquest by industrial breweries as economic growth while the value of small-scale traditional brewing goes uncounted. Much will be lost if this global "beerodiversity" is lost to the forces of corporate-led homogenization.

The globalization of beer not only destroys the social, spiritual, and health-related benefits of small-scale home beer production. It also undercuts the vital role that home brewing plays in sustainable development throughout the world. For 10,000 years, brewing has been conducted at home, primarily by women, who were entrusted with safeguarding traditions that strengthen social bonds and build community identity. As an important component of diet, beer was distributed by female household heads according to the values of the community, which moderated consumption to socially acceptable levels. As an inherently small-scale and local endeavor, brewing also has had a low impact on environmental resources, relying on renewable energy sources and requiring little or no packaging or shipping.

African Traditions

Despite the seemingly inexorable march of the global corporate beer industry, many African brewing traditions persist in the hands of rural women who brew at home. Throughout Africa, most brewing and drinking still occurs in the home, among family, and within the boundaries of community standards. Four times more homebrew than commercial-industrial brews is sold in Africa, which doesn't even include the great volumes of homebrewed beer consumed outside the cash economy. Women across sub-Saharan Africa use native grains like sorghum, millet, and teff, to brew drinks like rammoora, farsi, changaa, tella, and countless other uniquely African beer styles, often using homegrown and hand-malted brewing grains and handpicked herbs and spices.

This brewing provides a degree of economic empowerment to millions of African women. A study conducted in Uganda and Kenya found that 80 percent of the women included in the survey brewed beer, and about half of them had brewed beer for sale at some point in their lives. According to the survey, very few men brewed, and virtually none of them ever brewed beer for sale. Yet, men were found to account for a majority of the consumption. In this way, home-brewing beer accords women a degree of social and economic influence, helping to maintain a peaceful balance of power between the genders, providing women with a source of income and respect within the household.

Unfortunately, brewing traditions like these mostly go unnoticed and undervalued by scholars, economists, and policymakers. The little attention traditional drinks do attract tends to be negative. The development community typically regards traditional drinks as distasteful novelties at best and as destructive distractions at worst. Aid workers in Kenya, for example, have called for the prosecution of women who brew changaa, for reasons of public health and sanitation. Meanwhile, Kenya's main industrial brewing company has become part-owned by Diageo, the world's largest beer, wine, and spirits company, and SABMiller, the world's third largest brewing concern.

Africans, especially men, are fleeing the countryside in large numbers, seeking opportunity in cities. Those who find small success in the cash economy reach for a gleaming bottle of industrial beer as a low-cost symbol of their participation in the modern economy. Many more, though, find grinding poverty in Africa's megalopolises. Even the relatively inexpensive bottle of lager is out of reach for the many who resort to cheaper, highly potent modern versions of traditional drinks in desperate attempts to escape urban misery. Scenes of pre-Prohibition America and gin-soaked 18 th -century London are today being replayed in urbanizing Africa. Hard drinking is on the increase, while community and family disintegrate under the pressures of globalization.

Such scenes are found around the developing world. In South America, chicha, a traditional corn-based beer brewed by women, has become relatively scarce as industrial beers produced by global brewing companies fill the market created by the same urbanizing and modernization pressures felt in Africa. Traditional rice beers in Asia are only hanging on as western-owned brewing corporations move into the market. China in particular is at risk of losing its brewing traditions as foreign companies such as InBev buy up local breweries, temporarily making industrial beers cheaper and more attractive than traditional beers.

Regulations are necessary to prevent the predatory practices of corporate brewers and to preserve the role that indigenous brews play in sustainable development. Indeed, there is a long and noble tradition of just such regulatory practices that stretches back into the very origins of human society.

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Chris O'Brien combines two favorite things: drinking beer and saving the world. He is author of the new book Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World, and serves as director of the Responsible Purchasing Network at the Center for a New American Dream.

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