The vast majority of fruit andmore than half of the vegetables we consume in the UK are grown beyond our shores, with most of them arriving by airfreight. Wider sourcing of our food from developing countries in Africa and Asia has not only supported sustainable livelihoods across the globe, but has sated our appetite for a wide range of fresh produce, substantially improving our quality of living. In this eco-conscious age, this increase in the length of the supply chain has put the issue of ‘food miles’ firmly on the agenda. However, the whole debate is built on some rather shaky grounds.
Ever since some supermarkets first started singling out airfreighted goods back in 2007, scientists and the industry alike have sought to challenge the reasoning behind food miles.There are two problems with the use of the term.
First, it is a simplistic measure of how far a product has moved - it does not take into account how the goods have got there.Goods that have travelled on a ship from eastern Europe direct to the north-east of England, for example, will have a completely different carbon footprint to those that have travelled by truck over the same distance.It should be noted that due to the size of modern container ships and their fuel efficiency, goods can travel from as far away as New Zealand with a very low carbon footprint.Indeed, sometimes the carbon footprint of a UK road journey can exceed a long overseas journey.
The second reason that discussing food miles is a metaphorical blind alley is that distribution is only one part of the life cycle of a product. If we are serious about reducing our emissions, it is the whole life cycle that we need to address in order to take full account of the carbon footprint.As an example of how ignoring the production process can skew the debate, a bunch of flowers grown naturally in Kenya, then airfreighted, can have a lower footprint than if they had been grown in a heated Dutch greenhouse. Analysis by academics has found that to discern the real impact of a product, one has to measure emissions generated both from the transportation and the production process.
Waitrose recently confirmed that the same is true of crop cultivation. “Airfreighted produce can have a lower carbon footprint than produce grown in northern Europe because of the additional heating required when growing crops in a cooler climate,” the supermarket stated publicly.
Common sense won out recently when the Soil Association finally bowed to pressure and allowed airfreighted produce to display the organic label -a highly desirablefeature for the modern consumer. However, the furore surrounding the subject of food miles versus organic reveals a worrying lack of understanding across the board about how food is transported from overseas and on to our shelves, as well as a degree of confusion over what actually constitutes an organic product.
The argument should really have been declared null and void from the off, for a number of reasons.The term organic has always referred to the way something is produced and its contents. It has absolutely nothing to do with the way it is transported. Ask a typical shopper what they understand by ‘an organic product’ and they will tell you that it concerns the method in which the product was farmed or produced and whether any chemicals were used in the process. The distance a product has travelled is a separate issue for many shoppers and has as much to do with buying British in support of the domestic economy as it does with reducing one’s carbon footprint.
In any case, it is a decision that today’s well-informed consumer can make for themselves thanks to country of origin labels. By lumping organic in with all things linked to sustainable consumption, the waters are muddied and we risk confusing the consumer further.This debate could unfortunately be used to exclude African farmers from the lucrative organics market in Europe, to the detriment of millions of lives in some of the world’s poorest countries.
The importance of airfreight in opening up trade routes and markets for developing nations should not be underestimated, especially in this bleak global economy. After all, for countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua and Panama - whose per capita emissions are far lower than the UK’s - food comprises more than three-quarters of overall exports. More than 1m rural African livelihoodsdepend onthe UK’s consumption of their fruit and vegetables and, as we all know, airfreight is the only practical way to transport fresh produce many thousands of miles to consumers. It is simply unfair to stigmatise certain goods purely on the basis that they have been freighted by air.
Food miles, or the distance food has travelled, is on its own not a reliable indicator of the environmental impact of food transport.By demonising food from far-away developing countries, we are not only denying ourselves a world of fresh and varied produce - we are also denying some of the world’s poorest farmers a way of life and a chance to contribute to the global economy.
No comments yet