Br. J. Addict., 1976, Vol. 71, pp. 3-11. Longman. Printed in Great Britain.

Production, Consumption and Recent Changesof Consumption of Alcoholic BeveragesPekka Sulkunen

Part I. The Production and Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages

SummaryAccurate and reliable data on alcohol consumption and the production of alcoholic beverages are available mainlyfor western industriat countries.

The consumption of each beverage type is highty concentrated in regions in which they are part of an establisheddrinking culture. The rise of such a culture is based on both socio-economic and natural conditions of the productionofthe respective beverage type.

Of the three beverage groups which are distinguished by international statistics, production and consumptionof wine is most ctearly concentrated in certain wine areas, whereas the prevalence of beer is independent of theproduction of grain. Spirits are mostty consumed in countries where also grain production is voluminous.

This is interpreted so that a large part of present day beer consumption takes ptace in new circumstances and isnot tied io old traditions and beer drinking cultures. The consumption of wine is still traditional to a much greaterdegree.

IntroductionWe actually know surprisingly little about the use of alcohol in the world. In general,we are perhaps accustomed to thinking about it mainly as a custom belonging to theEuropean cultural sphere; but we overlook many peoples belonging to the aboriginalpopulations of Oceania, Asia, Africa and America, among whom alcohol is at leasticnown even if its use is not part of their established way of life. Anthropologicalstudies have shown that the use of alcohol might be quite common also in culturesother than those belonging to the sphere of European civilization (see e.g. Horton,1943).

In any event, very little information is available on the amounts of alcoholconsumed annually by nations inhabiting a large part ofthe world. That is why theinternational survey presented in the following is limited, for lack of data, to only apart of the globe, consisting mainly of Europe and the industrialized regions ofother continents. The available statistics in no case give a complete picture of thequantities of alcohol produced and consumed even in these countries. It should betaken into consideration in especial that in the estimates of per capita consumptionefforts were made in the calculation of the world's population to include all thepeoples on earth, whereas in the statistics on the consumption and production ofalcoholic beverages there appear only the nations on the most advanced social level.This is because the estimates of world production included in the statistics cannotbe accurately divided among the different countries. This is not important fromthe standpoint of the main line of argumentation, however, inasmuch as the dis-cussion is largely based on a comparison of types of beverages.

4 • Pekka Sulkunen

Even when limited in this fashion, there remains room in the material, to besure, for statistical examination of the situation by different countries. The amountsand forms of alcohol comsumption seem to follow fairly clearly the division of theworld's population into countries, nations and cultures—and the differences betweencountries are in some instances quite considerable.

As an example of the uneven distribution of the practice of drinking alcohol inthe part of the world about which relevant information is available, it might bepointed out that in Europe, where some 455 million people live, or about 13 percent of the total population of the world, roughly one-half of all the alcoholicbeverages in the world known to statistics are consumed. Within Europe itselfthe differences in consumption levels between various countries are extremelygreat; the per capita consumption ranges from Iceland's good three liters to France'snearly seventeen liters of absolute alcohol a year.

On other continents as well, there are countries with fairly high consumptionlevels. Of these the largest, Argentina, New Zealand, Chile, Canada, the UnitedStates and Japan, consume together with the nations of Europe no less than four-fifths of all the alcohol produced for human ingestion about which there existsstatistical knowledge. The combined population of these countries amounts to some800 million, or less than one-quarter ofthe world total. (Produktschap voor Gedistil-leerde Dranken, 1971.)

Alcoholic beverages are generally divided into three main classes: beer, winesand distilled liquors. They deviate from each other markedly depending on how,where and when they are used. Their differences are also reflected in the distributionof the respective beverage types. Whereas the five wine-drinking countries with thethe highest consumption rates, France, Italy, Spain, Argentina and Portugal,consumed in 1968 approximately two-thirds of all the wine produced the same yearin the world, the five countries with the heaviest beer consumption, Czechoslovakia,Belgium and Luxemburg, Australia, and England, consumed only about 30 percent ofthe beer brewed in the world that year. In the afore-mentioned wine-drinkingcountries, there lived five per cent and in the beer-drinking countries, four per centofthe total population ofthe world. Correspondingly, in the five countries consumingmost distilled liquor per capita, the proportion of the world production consumedamounted to some 36 per cent—and in these same countries there lived ten per centof the world population. These differences in themselves indicate that there existdifferent kinds of drinking cultures, in which different types of beverages have afundamental, if varying, significance. The consumption of wine appears to beconcentrated very markedly in lands boasting a wine culture. Beer and distilledliquors, on the other hand, are common in much more extensive regions and indiverse mixed cultures.

This may be observed also in considering the distribution of consumed alcoholon the part of different types of beverages in different countries. Beer in especial isconsumed very abundantly in many countries where the favorite type of beverageis spirits or wine. Also a large proportion of the consumption of hard liquors takesplace in countries where the principal alcoholic beverage is beer or wine. On theother hand, there are few countries where the most favored alcoholic drink is beer orhard liquor but where nevertheless wines are also ingested heavily (Wallgren et al.,1970, Table 1).

Production, Consumption and Recent Changes of Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages 5

Alcohol Cultures and Natural Conditions of Production of BeveragesThe rate of alcohol consumption in any given country is determined by the amountof alcoholic beverages produced there, the amount exported from there to othercountries and the amount imported there from abroad. Of these three components,the one of central importance is the first, the production of alcoholic beverages.The bulk of all the alcohol consumed annually in the world is produced for thedomestic market. Of wine, only one-tenth is shipped out to the world markets; thecombined export of beer amounts to only two per cent of the total world production,and the total export of distilled liquors does not exceed 20 per cent of the total worldproduction, either.

This means that the regional variation in the consumption of alcohol is bestexplained, in the statistical sense, by the prerequisites of production, which can bedivided into two types: the historical, or socio-economic, conditions of aloholproduction, and the natural prerequisites of alcohol production. By the former aremeant the over-all economic circumstances under which the production of alcoholicbeverages, too, took place. Included are the social mode of production (precapital-istic, capitalistic, socialistic), the special features of the socio-economic organization(conditions of land ownership, stage of social evolution) and the over-all prosperityof the society. By the latter, or natural conditions, I mean in particular the specialnatural prerequisites of production of a "technical" nature (the availability of rawmaterials, the cultivation conditions, etc.).

Both factors have presumably considerable significance from the standpoint ofboth the development of alcohol cultures referred to in the preceding section andthe rate of consumption. In the following, I shall confine myself mainly to anexamination of the natural conditions of alcohol production in the light of inter-national statistical data (FAO Production Yearbook, 1971; United Nations: TheGrowth of World Industry, 1971).

Now the first thing of interest is the correlation between these natural conditionsof production and the actual production of alcoholic beverages. It shows how muchthe prevalence of the consumption of different types of drinks is possibly basedon natural circumstances favoring their production and the customs that havedeveloped thereby, the conditions of food economy, etc. Owing to the rough charac-ter of the study, no absolutely true and historically accurate picture of drinkingcustoms and alcohol consumption can be drawn on the basis of the present material.Above all, it is a comparison between different types of beverages that is in question,and for that reason each type must first be considered separately.

WineThere is probably no simple method applicable to statistical treatment of

charting the existence of conditions for wine production on earth to enable one tocompare them with actual production. The cultivation of vines sets fairly severedemands with respect to the growing environment. Although we know that vinesrequire a certain temperature and soil of a special quality to produce utilizablegrapes, it is not possible, however, to determine reliably the existence of favorableareas for the planting of vineyards except on the basis of practical experience. It isnevertheless probable that suitable but unused areas exist on all the continents.

6 Pekka Sulkunen

This is indicated by the appearance of completely new winegrowing areas and therapid increase in production in, particularly, California, Australia, the SovietUnion and Bulgaria.

The production ofthe majority of such new and rapidly expanding winegrowingaxeas is based, at the same time, on the development of new consumption habits.Their production does not therefore replace the known and esteemed products ofold winegrowing areas but it is consumed mainly either by the creation of new con-sumer groups (among, for example, the youthful population) or by the emergenceof new features in the drinking habits of older consumers. This is what has happenedexpressly in the United States, where the wine production started after World WarII has grown into a significant factor in the liquor industry. Wine production in theUnited States was in 1968 as high as 9*5 million hectoliters, which correspondsroughly to the production of Algeria or Portugal the same year.

The great bulk of the world's wine production is, in any case, consumed in thecountries in which both the use of wine and its cultivation have old traditions. Insuch areas, the abundant consumption of wine per capita stems from the fact thatwine not only plays an essential role in all ceremonies and celebrations but is aroutine concomitant of daily life and usually has a place in the normal diet, too(cf., e.g. LoUi et al. 1958; Sadoun et al., 1965). Countries of this description are, asis well known, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain and Greece, which are located in thefertile winegrowing regions of Europe, the countries surrounding the Black Sea and,to some degree, also Argentina and Chile. In all these countries, it may be statedthat the natural conditions favoring production have influenced the extent andforms of wine consumption.

As indicative of the fact that such inter-relationships are by no means unambi-guous, one might cite the countries of North Africa—Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.All of them produce notable quantities of wine; in 1968, for instance, their combinedoutput was some 13 million hectoliters. The consumption of wine in these countries,however, is strikingly low. In Algeria, for one, less than two liters a year are con-sumed per capita on the average, a figure under a half the modest Finnish con-sumption of wine.

Beer

The "natural" component in the production of beer is easier to depict. Grain,barley in particular, is an essential ingredient of all types of beer, and it can befancied that between the beer output and the size of the grain crops there ought toprevail the same kind of correlation as between the conditions of winegrowing andthe production of wine. This parallel is not, of course, very close; but if we seek avariable to depict the natural conditions of beer production, then the amount ofgrain production comes closest to what we are looking for. It should be pointed outimmediately that the object of our interest, the possible effect of natural conditionson the development of different types of alcohol culture, would here presuppose, ofcourse, the availability of information about the production of grain from a ratherdistant past. Information along these lines is difficult, however, to obtain withsufficient reliability, so one must rest content with scrutinizing the relation betweengrain production and beer production cross-sectionally in the light of the data

Production, Consumption and Recent Changes of Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages 7

available from the year 1968. This mode of study would be wholly valid in theevent that in the countries where grain is nowadays produced abundantly therealso exists a "grain tradition", as it were—in other words, that the countries withthe biggest grain output have for a long time been producing proportionally asmuch grain as at the end of the decade of the 1960s.

Actually, the production of beer varies in comparison with that of grain in theworld fairly independently (FAO Production Yearbook, 1971). Beer is brewedabundantly also in countries where the abundance of raw material would not appearto afford very favorable conditions for its production. On the other hand, in manycountries where such conditions do exist the production of beer is rather slight.

This appears to indicate that the consumption of beer is based to a much lesserdegree on consumption habits rooted in production traditions than is that of winenotwithstanding the fact that in relation to total production beer plays a far smallerrole in world trade than wine does. Thus the consumption of beer in the worldresembles that of wine in new production areas like the United States andAustralia.

This parallel seems to be well grounded also in light of the fact that the produc-tion and consumption of beer have increased substantially in the world during the20th century, notably after World War II, this being true also of many countrieswhere grain is not produced for domestic consumption sufficiently even as food.On the whole, moreover, the great importance of beer as an alcoholic beverage is inmany countries the result of quite recent developments. It is not therefore possibleto argue that beer traditions have the same significance as do the traditions andhabits relating to the consumption of wine in winegrowing lands.

This does not contradict the fact that in many countries, such as, forexample, England, Germany and certain central European states, the consumptionof beer has a long past. The emphasis is rather that taking the world as a whole intoconsideration these traditions play a relatively minor role, at least compared withthe wine sector.

Distilled alcoholic drinks

The production of distilled liquors seems to some extent to be more firmly boundup with the production of grain (FAO Production Yearbook, 1971). According to theconclusions drawn in the foregoing, this would indicate that the "traditional" con-sumption connected with hard-liquor cultures accounts for a somewhat larger shareof the total world production of distilled beverages than in the case of beer. Thisconclusion is further supported by the fact that spirituous liquors are producedtraditionally also from other raw materials (fruits and berries).

The association of the drinking of distilled alcoholic beverages with some par-ticular alcohol tradition or drinking culture in a greater measure than beer drinkingis in agreement with the fact that the countries producing strong alcoholic beverageson the biggest scale are known for their production traditions (the whiskies of GreatBritain, the cognacs and brandies of France, the spirits of North and East Europe,etc.). Their products also hold soinewhat the same kind of position in the marketsof the world as do the products of the vineyards of the winegrowing countries.

8 Pekka Sulkunen

On the World Trade in Alcoholic BeveragesIn spite of the fact that the international trade in alcoholic beverages has a relativelyslight quantitative significance measured against world consumption of alcohol,commercial relations have also in certain cases formed traditions and shaped theworld's alcohol system. For example: England's close trade relations With Portugaland Spain in the 17th century had the effect of making port popular in England,especially among the rising trading class. The tradition that thereby emerged con-tinues to make itself felt in trade and consumption statistics. Alcohol traditions basedon trade relations of this kind have the feature, to be sure, that originally theyaffected only a small sector of the population and therefore do not have nearly thesignificance that the traditional consumption based on production has.

As far as wine is concerned, the special nature of the beverages imported fromabroad and the limiting of their consumption to rare occasions and to classes of thepopulation possessing wealth above the average are reflected clearly in the structureof export prices. The wines of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, which were exportedfor the most part to France in the past, are among the cheapest in the world. Theexport price of Algerian wine averaged in 1968 $11-40 a hectoliter, that of Tunisianwine about ten dollars and that of Moroccan wine about eight dollars a hectoliter.These wines were consumed mostly in France, either as a cheap table wine or asindustrial raw material. A contrasting example is the French wine exported to theUnited States, the average price of which in 1968 was over a hundred dollars ahectoliter. Compared with North African wines, European export wines are gener-ally quite expensive and presumably do not generate any drinking culture affectingthe consumption rate in the purchasing countries significantly and lastingly.

In the beer trade, no quite comparable price differences are to be noticed,although England's relationship to the Republic of Ireland resembles somewhatthe colonial relationship of France in the wine trade to the North African states.England buys about two million hectoliters of beer brewed in Ireland each year(approximately 50 per cent of Ireland's total beer production) and pays for it abouteleven dollars a hectoliter, which is substantially under the average world marketprice of beer ($18'60/hl). On the other hand, England exports nearly a millionhectoliters of beer a year at an average price of about thirty dollars a hectoliter(World Trade Annual, 1970).

All in all, in the alcohol economy of the world as a whole, the beer trade is ofonly slight importance, taken historically or from the standpoint of the present day.In only three countries does a significant part of the beer output go into the exporttrade—in Ireland about one half, and in Denmark and the Netherlands aboutone-fifth.

Traditional and New Alcohol ConsumptionIt has already been noted that the production and consumption of beer seem tobe more independent of natural productive conditions—and therefore also of thetraditions of production—than other alcoholic beverages are in spite of the fact thatthe importance of the international beer trade is very slight. By contrast, wines anddistilled liquors are bound up more tightly with either the production or com-mercial traditions.

Production, Consumption and Recent Changes of Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages

Beer 70/71145r- e West Germany

140 - •Belgium •Czechoslovakia

135 -

130 - Australia• Luxemburg125

120 -115 — • New Zealand

110 - •Denmark

105 - • United Kingdom

100

95

90

85

80

75

7065

60

50

45

40

35

Uruguay2015105

Switzerland Canada

• USA

• Netherlands

• Sweden

' Norway

• Ireland

• Hungary

• Finland

©Venezuela ^ Spain^Bulgaria• •Poland

^ . Jy ,•Israel Iceland • • South Africa •Cuba • ^ G r e e c e

5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 . 50 55 60 65 70- 75Share of labour force employed in agricultural occupations

FIG. 1. Per capita consumption of beer in 1971 and the proportionof the man power engaged in agriculture

The data concerning the distribution of man power by occupations derive from diiferentyears at the end, generally, of the decede of the 1960s, but in certain cases from earlieryears. The figure for Finland, for instance, is based on the census of 1960.

Sources: 1. Produktschap voor Gedistilleerde Dranken, 19722. ILO Yearbook of Labour Statistics, 1970, Table 2 A

10 Pekka Sulkunen

The consumption of beer is thus connected more closely than are other alcoholicdrinks with circumstances other than the natural prerequisites of production. Themain part of the consumption of beer therefore seems to involve a type of drinkingthat differs from the main part of the consumption of wine and distilled liquors.This difference is noticeable, above all, if the types of beverages are compared withrespect to the matter of how their average per capita consumption is connected tothe level of industrialization. Figure 1 reveals that in countries where only a minorpart of the labor force is employed in agricultural occupations, the average consump-tion of beer is usually high. The same sort of correlation is not to be perceived equallyclearly, at least, as far as wine and hard liquors are concerned.

In the interpretation of this observation, it might be thought that the con-sumption of alcohol in the world can be divided into two partly overlapping typesthat are in close correlation—the traditional (typical of an established drinkingculture) and the modern (representing consumption associated with a currentlydeveloping drinking culture). The structure of drinking and the rate of consumptionin each country result from the combined effect of these components. An examinationof the alcohol economy of the world as a whole reveals beer to form a significantpart of a new-type consumption. If matters are examined by types of beverages,again, it might be observed that inside the framework of traditional beer-drinkingcultures a smaller porportion of beer is consumed on the whole than in the case ofother alcoholic beverages. In advanced industrial countries, the effect of alcoholtraditions is slight and the genesis of new traditions in these countries has takenplace through an increase in beer consumption. Such a line of development hasbeen most conspicuous in many of the countries in which hard liquors have beendrunk in abundance but where their consumption decreased abruptly parallel withindustrial progress around the turn of the century. As the rate of alcohol consumptionagain rose later in the present century in these countries, including, for example,Canada, the United States, Ireland and the Scandinavian countries, it occurred inthe shape of an increase in the consumption of beer. The increase in alcohol con-sumption stimulated by the rise in general living standards has likewise to a largeextent involved beer in particular. The reasons for this are presumably many, butsufficient data are not available to prove what they are, although certain of themdo appear fairly self-evident. Two of them merit attention here.

First, in many industrial states the government has endeavored to control therate of alcohol consumption. Inasmuch as it has been believed that beer, owing toits low alcoholic content, would be less harmful than other alcoholic beverages,hard liquors in especial, efforts have been made by, for example, pricing policy tosteer consumption toward beer.

Second, the rising demand for alcoholic beverages has involved beer as a matterof course for the reason that it is suitable for use in quite diverse circumstances. Thelow alcoholic content of beer makes its ingestion easy even for persons who have notpreviously drunk alcoholic beverages (for example, women and young people).

Although the significance of beer in the new type of alcohol consumption on aworld scale is apparently greater than that of other types of beverages, also theconsumption of the latter belongs in certain countries to this consumption compo-nent. This observation applies to, for instance, the steadily increasing wine consump-tion of nations characterized by a spirits- and beer-drinking culture juSt as it does

Production, Consumption and Recent Changes of Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages 11

to the steeply rising consumption of beer and strong beverages in many traditionallywine-drinking countries. '

ReferencesFood and agriculture organization ofthe United Nations (FAO). Production yearbook, 1971, Rome 1972.HoRTON, DONALD. The functions of alcohol in primitive societies: A cross-cultural study. Quarterty Journat

of Studies on Alcohol 1943, IV, 2, 109-320.LoLLi, GIORGIO and SERIANNI, EMIDIO and GOLDER, GRACE M . and LUZZATTO-FERGIZ, PIERPAOLO.

Alcohol in Italian culture. New Haven, 1958.Produktschap voor Gedistilleerde Dranken. Hoeveet alcohothoudende dranken werden in de weretd gedronken?

Schiedam, 1971.SADOUN, ROLAND and LOLLI, GIORGIO and SILVERMAN, MILTON. Drinking in French cutture, New Brunswick,

1965.UNITED NATIONS. The growth of world industry, 1968, Vol. II., New York, 1970.UNITED NATIONS. World trade annual, 1970, Vol. I—V, New York, 1971.WALLOREN, HENRIK and KOSUNEN, ANNA-LIISA and NIKANDER, SVEN. Kytkeytyvdtko alkoholihaitat juoman

taatuun? (Are the harmful effects of alcohol connected with the type of beverage?). Unpublishedmanuscript, 1970.