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March of the Produce
by author Joe Skelton

While dining recently at my friend Hamish’s house, he apologized for the lack of taste and texture in the vegetables and the bland-tasting fruit salad. “It looked really fresh and it was reasonably priced,” Hamish said. “Why is it so hard to get decent-tasting produce in the winter?”

What Consumers Need to Know

While Hamish may have been dismayed that his checkout bargain turned out to be a dinner table disappointment, he might be surprised to learn that there are a plethora of serious issues to consider regarding the importation and transportation of the produce and goods that we consume. Besides purchasing food that often lacks taste and freshness, we are supporting a globalized food system that not only greatly contributes to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions; but it also adversely affects Canadian food producers, particularly those who supply fresh products to local and regional markets.

The result, similar to the produce in Hamish’s fruit salad, is that a great deal of our food is chalking up air miles at the expense of clean air and our health. Researcher Brian Halweil noted in his 2002 report for Worldwatch, Homegrown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market, “In the United States, food typically travels between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres from farm to plate, up to 25 percent farther than in 1980. In the United Kingdom, food travels 50 percent farther than it did two decades ago.”

As we transport food to distant markets, there is an increased need for additional packaging, refrigeration, and energy usage, which places further demands on the environment by increasing pollution and waste. Particularly unsettling is that much of the food transportation is needless, especially when trading partners are swapping foods that are basically the same.

Sue Kedgely, a New Zealand Green Party MP, is an outspoken critic of this wasteful practice. In a 2005 speech she questioned why her country, one of the world’s most efficient growers of livestock, imported over 29,000 tons of meat. “These food swaps don’t make environmental sense–or economic sense,” said Kedgely, “if you cost in the environmental and energy costs for transporting food across the world.”

Another prime example of inefficient food swapping is the importation of bottled water from distant climes into our country, which boasts an abundant supply of fresh potable water.

Succinctly summarizing the illogicality of much of our globalized food swapping, Halweil quotes Herman Daly, an ecological economist, who wrote, “Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Measuring the Environmental Costs

In their study Food, Fuel, and Freeways, researchers at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture explored the unreported costs of the global food system on Iowa and concluded, “External environmental and community costs related to the production, processing, storage, and transportation of the food are seldom accounted for in the food’s price, nor are consumers made aware of these external costs.” The heavy reliance on fossil fuels, the accompanying increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and economic drawbacks for local consumers and producers are significant factors in these “hidden” expenditures.

A 2005 Foodshare Toronto report, Fighting Global Warming at the Farmers’ Market, looked at food items to ascertain the environmental consequences of the distance they travelled from farm to market. “We compared transport distances, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from seven locally produced items and equivalent imported items,” wrote researchers Stephen Bentley and Ravenna Barker. They discovered carrots imported from California travelled more than 4,000 kilometres farther than Ontario-grown carrots, resulting in a CO₂ increase of 59 times. Lamb imported from New Zealand created more than eight kilograms of CO₂ compared to seven grams generated by the transportation of locally grown lamb.

The FoodShare researchers, factoring in emissions and energy consumption as a result of the shipping process, discovered that the locally grown food, over the course of a year, would create .006316 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, while the imported products would weigh in with CO₂ emissions of .573 tonnes. (For information on calculating the food miles your food contains, visit leopold.iastate.edu/pubs/staff/ppp/.

A Call for Change

Joe Skelton is a Langley, BC-based writer who writes about natural health and environmental issues.

Source: alive #282, April 2006