Environment
From "Maple Street Co-op News", Oct/Nov 2007
Food Miles for Thought
By Lori Sturtz
If every American ate just one meal a week consisting of organic and
locally-produced food, US oil consumption - the highest in the world
- would be reduced by 1.1 million barrels a week. Not surprising when
you consider in an average US meal, every food item has travelled about
2,100 kilometres.1
Similarly in Australia, food travels a long way to reach our plates:
an estimated average of 2,000 kilometres, according to Sustainable Maleny.
Transporting food from paddock to plate is only the start. There's also
the operation of farm machinery, the manufacture of synthetic fertilisers,
pesticides and herbicides, processing, refrigeration, packaging and
warehousing.
'Food miles' is a term now commonly used to measure the distance that
food products travel from where they are produced to where they are
consumed.
According to a July 2007 report by Ceres Community Environment Park
in Victoria, food miles are important, however they don't show the complete
picture. They should be considered just one part of a "larger complete
life-cycle assessment required to compare the sustainability of individual
items in food systems." At the time of this report, the authors
knew of no Australian-specific food miles research.2
"The concept of food miles should be a critical element in regional
planning," says Barry Earsman of Sustainable Maleny. "The
current system makes us extremely vulnerable to disruptions in the supply
of cheap oil, and produces unnecessary quantities of greenhouse gases."
The food merry-go-round
Food transport is now a bizarre profit-driven business that no longer
has much to do with feeding people. (The world's farms grow enough food
to feed every person on the planet.) US consumers pay 85 cents of every
food dollar to food processors, transporters and marketers. America
annually exports 1.1 million tonnes of potatoes, while at the same time
importing almost 1.4 million tonnes.
International food trade has tripled in the past 40 years, and four
times as many tonnes of food are transported between nations, while
world population has only doubled.3
Global trade deals made by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank,
allow corporations to purchase food from countries with very poor environmental,
safety and labour conditions. This pits farmers from one country to
another against each other.
This global reshuffling of food generates a lot of money - and uses
a lot of oil. However the main benefactors are the shippers, brokers,
processors, supermarkets and oil companies, not the poor farmers in
developing countries.
This practice encourages developing nations to promote overproduction
of commodity crops. These crops are then sold well below market price,
which undermines the fragile developing economies. These farmers should
be feeding their own communities, but the international markets do not
allow this.
Thus, when consumers buy Brazilian soy, they may be supporting some
corporation that has destroyed huge amounts of Amazon rainforest, which
in turn has destroyed the local indigenous population.4
How accurate a measure are food miles?
In the UK, food miles and their accumulated CO2 emissions now appear
on food labels, though it's unlikely we'll see food miles printed on
Australian packaging any time soon, as the food mile is a somewhat deceptive
way to measure a food product's carbon footprint.
A group of New Zealand scientists at Lincoln University conducted a
life-cycle analysis of certain foods. They included water usage, fertiliser
usage, harvesting techniques, renewable energy applications, transportation,
type of fuel used, storage procedures, and many other cultivation inputs.
The researchers reached some interesting conclusions. They found that
it was four times more energy efficient for Londoners to buy New Zealand
lamb than British lamb! Lamb raised on New Zealand clover pastures with
non-irrigated water, and shipped by boat to Britain, produced 690 kilograms
of CO2 per tonne, while the British lamb raised on grain feed and irrigated
water, produced 2,280 kilograms of CO2 per tonne. Similar numbers were
found for fruit and dairy products.5
A Defra (the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
report, found that less energy was used to grow Spanish tomatoes than
British. Defra also said that "...it can be more sustainable to
import organic food into the UK than to grow non-organic food in the
UK".6
These findings bring another perspective to the local-verses-global
debate. Food miles have a complex relationship to sustainability. There
may be environmental, economic and social trade-offs. Therefore, food
miles alone may not be an appropriate measure. For instance, a long
boat journey has less environmental impact than a shorter road trip.
Airfreight is by far the worst polluter when it comes to transporting
food, emitting 50 times more CO2 than marine transport. Jet fuel is
not taxed, which makes it cheaper and more attractive to use.
Nowadays, food travels further due to centralised supermarket systems
that have replaced local and regional outlets. An apple can be transported
many kilometres to be packaged at one of these central depots, then
sent back to be sold in the region where it was originally grown. Food
processors may move ingredients from factories in one country to factories
in other countries, before the final product ends up in a supermarket.
For example, some British fish is sent to China for processing (cheaper
labour costs), and then sent back to the UK to be sold.
Ninety-five per cent of fruit and 50 per cent of all vegetables in the
UK are imported. Defra says that food miles increased 15 per cent from
1992 to 2002.7 Our desire for out-of-season produce all year round has
its consequences for the environment.
Nick Francis from Cool NRG says the first step is recognising that there
is a real cost to transporting food around the world. One solution could
be the use of solar or wind power to transport food.8 However, in the
meantime there are some simple solutions. Buying local organic food
is one of them. Driving shorter distances to shop is another.
The Soil & Health Association of New Zealand believes that because
organic farming uses much less energy, it will help New Zealand reach
its carbon neutral targets. Organic farming increases carbon sequestration,
and has much lower external environmental costs.
Swedish research involving 23 dairy farms found that total energy use
of organic dairy farms per unit was significantly less than that of
conventional dairies. CO2 emissions were similarly lower as well. Soil
& Health also noted that when consumer prices were added to environmental
costs of conventional farming, the cost of conventional food was four
times that of organic food.
American studies found organic farming methods were far more effective
at removing CO2 from the atmosphere and fixing it as beneficial matter
in the soil. The Rodale Institute study, (conducted over 23 years),
calculated that if 10,000 mid-sized US farms switched to organic farming,
it would be the equivalent of taking 1,174,400 cars off the road - or
driving 14.62 billion miles less. This research also found that soluble
nitrogen fertilisers in conventional farming destroyed soil biota that
trap greenhouse gases.
Soil & Health acknowledges that continued government support for
organics will be an important solution to food miles arguments, and
to a sustainable New Zealand.9
Playing with our food
Monoculture crops, like soy and corn, are now heavily subsidised commodity
crops that no longer feed people. They are the raw materials for an
industrial factory business responsible for creating high-fructose corn
syrup, (found in almost all US processed foods), partially hydrogenated
oils and thousands of other chemicals. The surplus calories from soy
and corn have ended up in the junk food that provides a third of all
US calories - and they are subsidised with taxpayers money! This industrial
farming promotes salinisation, desertification, soil erosion and the
loss of soil fertility.
Crop varieties have also been lost. Only one per cent of vegetable varieties
grown 100 years ago are available in US supermarkets today. Peru used
to grow some 4,000 potato varieties, and now only a few dozen remain.
Up until the late 1990s, farmers in India grew numerous indigenous oil
crops such as linseed, mustards and sesame. All the small oil mills
that used to process these oils were ordered closed in 1998, the same
year a ban on soy in India was lifted. Genetically modified (GM) soy
found a vast new market, and a million villages lost their livelihood.
According to Dr Vandana Shiva, an Indian crop ecologist, humans have
gone from eating 80,000 plant species to just eight! Food crops are
being lost as fast as rainforests.10
Agribusiness is removing crop control from farmers. Six companies, (including
Monsanto and DuPont), now control 98 per cent of world seed sales. GM
crops are patentable properties and therefore generate big money for
these companies. Monsanto allocates US $10 million a year for investigating
and prosecuting people who save seeds. These companies can patent plant
varieties in order to remove them from the market. Farmers and home
gardeners probably don't realise that the seeds they are buying are
actually owned by these agribusinesses.
US garden seed inventories show that there were 5,000 non-hybrid vegetable
varieties available in 1981, and these were reduced to 600 in 1998.
(Hybrid varieties are produced with human manipulation for specific
gene characteristics.)
Maple St Co-op carries seeds from two Australian seed companies. The
seeds are all traditional, open pollinated and non-hybrid varieties.
Greenpatch seeds are certified organic and Eden seeds have no chemical
treatment. These heirloom seeds are not usually grown commercially.
They exhibit a distinctive characteristic, such as unusual coloration
and superior taste. Most vegetable varieties found in supermarkets are
grown for their sturdiness, in order to be transported long distances.
These indestructible variations have little taste and tend to look very
uniform.
The local - or 'locavore' - food movement is growing bigger all the
time. Organic growers, small scale food producers and farmers' markets
are springing up everywhere. Buying local, organic fruit and vegies
supports not only the local farmers and growers, it also supports the
seed saver companies. This local food movement addresses many issues,
including environmental, agricultural sustainability and fair wages.
And you know when you sit down to a plate of locally-grown food, you
won't be consuming a tonne of hidden oil.
Endnotes
1. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, USA 2007
HarperCollins Inc.
2. www.ceres.org.au/projects/foodmiles.html
3. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver.
4. ibid.
5. www.carbonplanet.com
6. www.bbc.co.uk
7. ibid.
8. www.abc.net.au/victoria
9. Soil & Health Association of NZ Inc. Press Release, Nov 4 2006
10. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver.
*I would like to thank Carol Couch for giving me the book, Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle, which inspired this article.
[From "Maple Street Co-op News", October/November 2007; published
by The Maple Street Co-operative Society Ltd, 37 Maple Street, Maleny,
Qld 4552, Australia, tel (07) 5494 2088, email maplest.co-op@serv.net.au,
website http://www.maplestreetco-op.com.au]