Can compassion be generated through consumption? That’s the scheme behind Product RED, the celebrity-powered AIDS fundraiser starring Bono with a supporting cast of Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio and other Hollywood actors. Bono’s idea is to leverage the power of celebrity and the profit motive, nudging corporations into glossy campaigns whose sales pitch for goods is transmuted into social good. After all, a portion of each purchase goes to the Global Fund, disbursing money specifically to “deserving victims” of AIDS i.e. women and children of the plague-ridden continent.
Anything wrong with that? Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte think so. Their provocative book Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (published by University of Minnesota Press) is a rebuke to the project. Academics with solid backgrounds in issues concerning poverty, population and global economics, Richey-Ponte see Product RED as a way to polish the profile of greedy transnational corporations while selling their wares and tossing chump change into the collection box. Many of RED’s corporate sponsors are implicated in the economic system that has left much of Africa in catastrophe; their financial contributions to AIDS sufferers through the program amounted by December 2010 to $160 million, less than one percent of the total money donated to the Global Fund since its inception. In the authors’ words, “RED is a small drop in the Global Fund’s large bucket.”
Of course, it can be argued (and Bono argues it) that the $160 million is money from the pocketbooks of consumers who might not otherwise donate to AIDS. The authors respond that RED’s corporate sponsors would do better by altering their business practices, fostering more equitable economic and social arrangements.
Both sides are correct. Richey and Ponte make a profound point about a world where better ideals would lead to better conditions, yet Bono and company are prepared to work with the world as it is in the hope that something good can come from the effort. It’s difficult to measure how much consciousness-raising RED has actually triggered among the self-involved shoppers of the global economy, but isn’t the lack of engagement by “compassionate consumers” different only in degree from donors who write checks for charity but never roll up their sleeves to help the cause? Bottom line: $160 million looks small as a line item on a multi-national budget, but it buys a lot of care in the impoverished places of the earth.
