Food for Thought

Sky-rocketing food prices have finally dampened the enthusiasm of using food crops to drive cars. But in Europe a new fad is catching on to save the environment: labelling imported food so that consumers can choose local food, which requires less transportation and, thus, supposedly less consumption of fossil fuels. In reality, it might end up hurting the world’s poor without making any dent on global warming.

Just as rising energy prices and concern over climate change once led to a stampede to turn food crops into biofuel, neo-nationalism and environmentalism are now pushing European businesses to adopt quick fixes like slapping labels indicating foreign origin or the carbon costs of the produce.

The British supermarket giant Tesco, which last year sought to pacify environmentalists by putting ‘air freighted’ labels on imported fresh fruit and vegetables, has just launched a new campaign of ‘carbon labelling’ grocery items that would supposedly reveal how much carbon is released in their production, transport and consumption. Although environmental science experts have difficulty agreeing how to calculate the total carbon cost of a product, Tesco has jumped on to the green-market wagon. The onus is now on shoppers to save the world by checking the emission costs of products in the same way they might the caloric content listed on cereal boxes. Carbon labelling will become another tool in the hands of protectionists.

Tesco has been one of the earliest to warm to the environmental slogan about curbing the food mile — the distance food has to travel from the farm to the dinner table — by slapping airplane icon stickers on imported food. The label is supposed to warn consumers that eating foreign imports such as green beans from Kenya is tantamount to increasing global warming. Such simplistic analysis ignores the much higher carbon emissions resulting from growing the same vegetables in Europe’s greenhouses, using chemical fertilisers or keeping them in cold storage for months. And the gain? The boycott of air-freighted African produce, according to an estimate, would cut Britain’s total emissions by less than 0.1 per cent. The net result of such a misguided environmental choice would be to deny poor farmers in developing countries the benefits of globalisation while increasing rather than curbing global warming.

For over a century, since the arrival of refrigerated ships, Britain has imported fresh food, improving the island’s diet while providing new opportunities to farmers abroad. Queen Victoria dined on the first consignment of frozen Australian lamb to arrive in London in 1880. Thanks to the liberalisation of trade and falling air-freight costs, the world’s non-traditional food producers have found ways to access the world market. The availability of fresh fruit from the tropics during the northern hemisphere’s winter offered a healthier and cheaper alternative. Since 1996, the total export value of fresh fruits worldwide has more than doubled to $11 billion in 2003. Rising health consciousness and the facility to ship fresh vegetables to Europe the same day have allowed farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to join the world supply chain. Burgeoning horticultural trade has opened new avenues to farmers in Asia and South America as well.

Traditional methods of farming with organic fertiliser and non-mechanised irrigation not only produced agricultural products that address the West’s environmental concerns, but also provide jobs to people who would otherwise be left out of the globalised network.

Although rising CO2 emission from increased global freight demands attention, an airplane sticker on a packet of beans is hardly a solution. Other factors such as cold storage, green houses, high-energy production cost also need to be worked into calculation of carbon footprint. A policy that focuses exclusively or mainly on the transport content to calculate a product’s carbon footprint and, thus, privileges local over imported items helps neither the climate nor the producers or consumers. There has to be an agreed framework to calculate the lifetime carbon costs of a product — from the seed to the dining table — before poor farmers are denied their paltry gains by the very countries whose industrialisation is responsible for build-up in the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These feel-good policies will likely fail to reduce carbon emissions substantially while delivering a blow to those with the smallest of carbon footprints.