For personal consumption and to supplement meager wages, families dip into limited supplies of food like rice and millet to produce home brews. In East Africa, mothers routinely pay children's school fees with money from the sale of home brew. At the same time, it is often the children who go hungry when food supplies are exhausted. Despite the high price young people pay for adult drinking, youth in developing countries are drinking at increasingly earlier ages. This trend is largely due to advertising that targets young people.
Ads imply that drinkers are successful people with beautiful bodies and enormous sex appeal.
We see young professionals with rock-hard livers who need transplants to survive. Whatever their age, heavy drinkers in developing countries, as in the West, wreak havoc on their families. Women in developing countries who suffer from alcohol-related abuse and even torture are unlikely to leave their husbands or ask for legal protection. Social supports are minimal and few have the job skills or self-confidence to survive outside of marriage. For many Hindu women, the sense of helplessness is reinforced by fatalistic religious beliefs.