OPINIONS lain vs. Child Advertising lain W. Reeve, Assistant Editor I can’t recall for sure, but it is entirely likely that I threatened my mother with everything from running away to revoking my love at some point in my childhood. Being an only child and having what basically amounted to three parents—my grandmother has lived with my family since I was two—I was a very spoiled child. My family didn’t have tons of money, but what there was to spare usually got siphoned into Iain’s newest “must-have” toy, game, or whatever. Toy commercials always kept me in the know about what the newest must have was. Today, little has changed. Child advertising is an absolutely massive industry, and is the fastest growing sector of the advertising industry in general. Every year, millions are spent by companies trying to move more products onto the most gullible of all target markets: children. Running behind them as a close second for most gullible target market is those girls who wear $200 jeans and walk really, really slow in Metrotown. You know the ones. It’s pretty obvious that child marketing should have a different flavour than normal marketing. There are similarities of course; kids are shown having fun, being happy, and doing amazing, adventurous things in child ads. All the action revolves, of course, around the product being hawked, but there’s nothing different about that. What is differ- ent is that child ad agents don’t need to worry about a product looking expensive, dangerous, or difficult to attain, as most kids, especially below the age of 12, don’t really have a strong understanding of those things. And, since children have very little money of their own, the purpose of the ads is to get kids to nag their parents for products they see in commercials. What we come down to here is a morality issue. Is it moral to use sophisticated media techniques, which work in spades on adults, on young people who are not yet at a level of mental development where they can even tell the difference between an advertisement and an educational message? When kids see a commercial they don’t consider the cost, safety, durability, or usefulness of a product, they just see something that is fun and want it. Then parents are nagged to death—studies show that more nagging equals more pur- chases—moeaning they have to either give in, or say no and deal with an unruly child. Parents can hardly be blamed for giving into their children a lot of the time. A happy kid is much easier to deal with, especially for the time crunched parent who may work 40 hours a week, need to do house work, and take after a child. Also, parental guilt, some- thing I was very good at invoking in my par- ents, is often felt just as hard when a parent is depriving their child of something they want as when they deprive them of some- thing they need. This means well meaning parents are letting their kids have too many toys, see movies for sheer entertainment when they should be learning, and eat too much junk food, contributing to ever-rising child obesity. Banning advertising is not a silver bullet to all these problems. Québec instituted a child-advertising ban in 1979 and they still have these problems. However, it is one major step that could include things like more money for educational programming, cutting junk food out of schools, and helping kids become more media literate. If nothing else tricking kids into buying things is immoral, and that is reason enough. NATIT Matters David Suzuki, David Suzuki Foundation How do you feed nine billion people? It’s a daunting question, but one we really need to be asking ourselves if we hope to feed humanity without severely degrading the earth’s natural systems. It may be hard to believe, but when I was born in 1936, there were just over two billion people in the world. In my lifetime, that has - more than doubled. Today, United Nations’ population estimates show that between now and 2050, another 2.9 billion souls will be — added to our little planet. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But feeding them is just part of the challenge. Current intensive agricultur- al practices have a number of unwanted side effects—from pesticide use and fertilizer run- off, for example—that can harm wildlife, pol- lute water and otherwise damage the natural . "systems that we ultimately rely on for our health and well-being too. So the question really is, how do we sus- tainably feed nine billion people? A new report recently published in the journal Science provides us with some indication. As part of a comprehensive study, researchers s THE OTHER PRESS FEBRUARY 1 2007 with the University of Reading in the UK looked at bird population trends to develop a threat-based risk assessment model that will predict the impact of agricultural practices on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Birds are especially relevant for such a study because they can be very sensitive to agricultural practices. Populations of wild birds in the UK have plummeted nearly in half since 1970 and the government has com- mitted to reversing the decline by 2020. Unfortunately, according to the assessment in Science, government policies designed to help the birds don’t go far enough and, unless they are changed, bird populations will continue to decline. : Researchers developed their “crystal ball” assessment model by examining three basic needs for all birds: they all need a place to nest, they need a place to forage for food, and they need to be able to find food in their forage areas. The model also takes into account how vulnerable specific bird species are to changes in any of these areas. Some birds, for example, will only nest in a few spe- cific types of bushes. If those bushes disap- pear, so do the birds. To test their model, the researchers exam- ined the major factors in which agriculture in the UK has changed and intensified over the past 40 years. These include: switching from spring to fall sowing, increasing chemical fer- tilizer use, the loss of wild natura] areas, increasing drainage of the land, and increas- ing intensity of grassland management. When they plugged these changes into their assessment model and looked at what it predicted would occur to 57 bird species, the results strongly correlated with actual histori- cal data. In both their matrix and in reality, bird populations fell as these agricultural changes became more increasingly common across the country. Next, researchers used their model to look at the future of 62 bird species. Much attention in the UK has been paid to the importance of conserving hedgerows to pro- tect birds. Indeed, hedgerows are important nesting habitat. However, when researchers used their model to predict the future of Agricultura policy for the birds these species, it came out as rather bleak. Most of them continued to decline, even if hedgerow conservation measures were suc- cessful. It turns out that the birds’ future depends much on what happens in the field: not just the hedgerows—so changing far practices will be essential to their survival. Predicting the future of species using kind of analysis is never going to be perfec but it’s an important and useful tool. As the researchers point out: “Unless the foot-print of agriculture is carefully managed through sustainable development, both agricultural systems and remaining natural ecosystems suffer further degradation, increasing the prq portion of the world’s species threatened wi extinction and further limiting the ecosyste services they are capable of providing.” In other words, status quo isn’t really a healthy option for humanity or the rest of nature—so we’d better use every tool at our disposal. Take the Nature Challenge and learn more 2 www.davidsuzuki.org.