Sumati Nagrath
Twenty-six-year-old sarah rudd, who lives in the small town of Rugby in the UK, has never been abroad. She has not even been inside an airplane. But the food she eats has. In fact, most of the fruits and vegetables neatly stocked in her fridge have travelled thousands of kilometres from far-flung countries. The onions she picked up from her local supermarket have travelled over 19,000 km from New Zealand, the green beans around 6,800 km from Kenya, the cherry tomatoes almost 9,000 km from the US and the bananas have travelled 5,000 km all the way from India.
So, while Rudd, who works as an office administrator, is yet to earn a single air mile, her evening meal has already clocked up several thousand ‘food miles’, a measure of the distance that fresh food travels from the farmer’s field to the consumer’s plate. However, ‘food miles’ — an idea that originated in the UK and Sweden a few years ago — is more than just about the distance. It translates into energy consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. As a concept, it is meant to raise awareness amongst consumers and policy makers of the problems associated with a food system that is based on global sourcing and rather complicated, transport-intensive supply chains.
At the core of the idea of food miles is a desire to understand and highlight the social and environmental impacts of the changing food system as well as consumers’ food choices. And it is a concept that is fast gaining currency with various consumer and environmental groups.
Reducing Food Pollution
Doubtless, it is insufficient to simplify the impact of food production, distribution and consumption to merely a unit of length. Measuring a food product’s actual carbon footprint would take into account mode of production, packaging, cooking process, and wastage as well. Still, the term ‘food miles’ does have a growing resonance and has become a hot topic of discussion for government, industry, consumers and environmental groups in many of the developed countries. Take the case of Australia where the Australian Conservation Foundation is supporting a call by the country's farmers for clearer country of origin labelling, or Canada where the government has asked food retailers to reduce food miles as a measure to reduce their emissions contribution.
According to a 2005 report by the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, food miles in the country rose by 15 per cent between 1992 and 2002 to total up to a staggering 20 billion vehicle-kilometres. In 2002 alone these food miles created 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — almost 2 per cent of the UK’s total carbon emissions, costing the British economy almost £9 billion.
These findings led to ‘food miles’ being cited as a priority area of action by the British government in its recently published Food Industry Sustainability Strategy. The document proposes that “as a contribution to both carbon saving and other environmental benefits and to local sourcing there needs to be a reduction in the domestic level of the environmental and social costs associated with the industry’s food miles by, say, 20 per cent by 2012”.
In India, meanwhile, mention of the term ‘food miles’ invites blank expressions and requires much explanation. But this is not necessarily a result of apathy or unawareness. It would appear that we in India simply do not clock up significant food miles. Being the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world — ‘exotic’ foods such as kiwis, asparagus and pak-choi are also grown in parts of the country — minimises the need to import. “In India we are lucky that most of our fresh produce is procured locally, all across the hotel industry,” says Niranjan Khatri, general manager of Welcomenviron Initiatives, a division of ITC-Welcomgroup Hotels.
“We do import some exotic foods such as certain varieties of cheese but it is so expensive that there are few takers.” Given that transportation costs of flying in produce are almost prohibitive, he says “in some ways economic concerns are actually helping the environmental ones”.
Indian food retailers such as Reliance Fresh, too, source locally, with imports such as Chinese apples forming a minuscule proportion of their total stock. “Our big concern is how to strengthen the supply chain in order to minimise wastage, which can amount to almost 40 per cent,” says a Reliance Industries spokesperson. “Given that we have so much local produce easily available, imports just don’t make sense.” It would seem that a combination of abundance of produce and prohibitive transportation costs mean that we in India don’t have to worry about food miles, yet.
In the West, however, as concerns over climate change grow, the distances travelled by food are coming under greater scrutiny and retailers are responding to heightened consumer awareness through a variety of measures. “We find that our consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment and want to know the provenance of food products, especially fresh produce,” says Greg Sage, international corporate affairs manager of Tesco, the UK-based retail giant. “We have clear labelling that indicates not just the country of origin but also the mode of transportation used to import it so that customers can make an informed choice.”
While major UK chains such as Tesco, Asda, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose have all expressed an intention to ensure that local sourcing accounts for almost 70 per cent of the stock in the near future, at the moment imports continue to outweigh local sourcing. This is because “there is a demand for different fruit and vegetables all year round,” says Sage. “We do have to import some produce, including bananas and citrus fruit, which cannot be grown in the UK.” He adds that Tesco tries to minimise the environmental impact by bringing in the vast majority of products by sea, and less than 3 per cent by air — the mode of transportation with the largest carbon footprint.
A similar argument is given by the US retail giant Wal-Mart. “While we buy millions of dollars of imported produce, that volume comes primarily when the product is off season in the US, the product is not grown in the US, or adequate supply or quality is not available from our US sources,” says Wal-Mart spokesperson via e-mail.
Although both Tesco and Wal-Mart hold consumer demands for off-season products responsible for the significant proportion of imports, it is the supermarkets themselves that have spoilt the consumers by offering, what would typically be seasonal fruits and vegetables every day of the year, even if it has meant having to air-freight them from long distances. “Hopefully we will learn from the West’s mistakes,” says Khatri. “The day we start importing potatoes, is the day we should start worrying.”
A Question Of Livelihood
Now the pressure is on from farmers groups, the government and consumers such as Rudd who want food retailers to source more and more produce locally, organically and according to season. But will doing that really ease environmental impact?
Firstly, there is a real dilemma in the case of organic produce. Traditionally consumers opt for organic foods, not only because they are more wholesome but also because organic production includes less energy use and therefore lower greenhouse emissions. However, if organic products are transported long-distance, particularly by air, the emissions are far greater than the reduced emissions resulting from organic, rather than conventional farming. This realisation recently led the Soil Association — Britain’s leading organic food certifying body —to almost stripping air-freighted foods of their organic status.
The decision was called off in the face of criticism from various development organisations who argued that air-freighted organic food is crucial to the economy of poor countries such as Ghana, Peru and Kenya where small-holder farmers have invested huge amounts to meet the standards demanded for export.
The fact that their produce could become an environmental pariah and be shunned by consumers in the West is deeply worrying and could have serious developmental implications for their fragile existence.
Stuart Rose, the CEO of Marks & Spencer (M&S), which has also started to label air-freighted produce to inform shoppers, released a press statement in July 2007 to assuage the fears of Kenyan farmers. The release quoted Rose as saying, “We are aware there have been recent discussions in Kenya about the issue of food miles. As a part of our wider commitment to make M&S a carbon neutral business, we are looking at ways of reducing our use of air freight. However, I want to emphasise that we aim to do this by using alternative modes of transport, like shipping, and not by reducing our trade with developing countries.”
As of now none of the major retailers have reversed their sourcing decisions based on food miles. “We have not stopped buying imported product from any country due to concerns about food miles,” says the Wal-Mart spokesperson. Neither Tesco nor Wal-Mart source any fresh produce from India at the moment and refuse to comment on the possibility that the option to do so might be also be thwarted if food miles gains traction.
However, there are those who are sceptical of the whole concept of food miles. A 2006 report produced by the Lincoln University in New Zealand shows that even if the environmental cost of transporting goods to the UK is taken into account, New Zealand still uses considerably less energy than the UK in the production of sheep meat, dairy, and apples.
There are also those who argue that it is more energy efficient to truck fresh tomatoes grown in the fields of Spain into the UK rather than cultivate them in hot houses in the country.
Whether food miles catches on as a concept in India as it stands at the cusp of a retail revolution, remains to be seen. And although it is not the most accurate of measures, ‘food miles’ is doing a good job of attracting attention towards the fundamental issues surrounding the sustainability of the globalised food trade and the increasing concentration of the food supply base and distribution in the hands of fewer and fewer transnational corporations.
