Balance of Nature in the Food Industry
Food miles have been used to shut the European market to third world produce, not withstanding the fact that the touted carbon footprint is even higher in glasshouse food production. May be nature has the solution to world hunger, if man were to listen.
‘Feed all the nations first, then think of world peace and world market share indexes,’ urges Ayub Chege in a discussion on need to increase global food production.
Food Miles
When the war on food miles and the health quotient of imported foodstuff was hot news threatening the livelihoods of millions of hardworking resource constrained smallholder farmers in the developing world, supermarkets in the West stood tall extolling the virtues of locally sources foodstuffs and produce. Alongside stood the world famed Soil Association of the United Kingdom- the certifier and standard setter of all that is organic and decent for mankind to eat. Thus aligned, the superpowers in the food industry had dealt the blow to kill any business venture and industrial future of the third world.
It didn’t matter that the proclaimed food miles were scientifically and ecologically more environmentally friendly and a practical step fighting global warming. It didn’t arise that the carbon footprint didn’t start and end with the airfreight. It didn’t dawn on some that bananas could not be faxed from Costa Rica or coffee and French beans be emailed from Kenya. All that shone throughout the world was that floriculture was doing in the market against “locally sourced foods” that were “ethically grown and harvested and transported” to the supermarket in “under thirty hours.” So, produce their own they had to, at whatever cost in terms of and costs to greenhouse investments.
To many even today, the expenditures in greenhouse warming is not as harmful to the environment as the fumes from airfreights, despite these accounting for less than one percent of the total UK’s food miles. Furthermore, food transportations within UK – from the houses to the supermarkets in SUVs, supermarket deliveries, HGV distributions, transport from farm to the store – contribute less than ten percent of the carbon emissions attributed to other food-related factors, which is much lower than that from agricultural production, household related factors like wastage, storage and catering, and even processing/manufacturing.
Few- even the learned scientists- saw the real dimensions of the food miles as only a small insignificant speck on the larger picture, nor the real source of the Carbon footprint from where to tackle. Few businesses, too, saw the dangers of reduced cargo freights. With declining numbers of travellers, some recompense could only be made with more cargo. Airlines like BA and Virgin wisely came to the aid of farmers, wisely aware that they would have suffered decreased returns in their operations, therefore generating lower government revenues, thus contributing to the increasing unemployment with prospects of job cuts, hence making the government invest less on social services, leading to dissatisfied citizens… and increased crimes and finally, anarchy.
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