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It's not just the miles
Don't expect this food thing to be simple. As Ian Brown reminds us on his Fair Tracing blog today, the distance travelled by a product is only one component of its ecological impact. All the transport mechanisms used, and the amount of other goods carried at the same time, also need to be taken into account.
Ian quotes one UK minister as saying that “flowers flown from Africa can use less energy overall than those produced in Europe because they’re not grown in heated greenhouses”. A total-energy-used metric has also been used to show that "tomatoes grown outdoors in Spain, then flown to the UK are responsible for fewer carbon emissions than UK tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses".
Which may be true. But is it relevant? Just because because a product flown from another country is "responsible for fewer carbon emissions than its UK equivalent", does not mean it its import is sustainable. The crunch issue is how much we have to reduce resource flows and emissions overall - not whether one flow is less damaging than another.
Discussion of that Final Number is where argument gets really heated. Some say we have to reduce by 60%. Others talk publicly about "Factor Four" (and in private say it's factor 20). And who gets to decide what the Number is? Scientists? Politicians? Designers?
Also responding to Ian's post, Edward Griffith-Jones refers us to a paper he's just written on The negative development impacts of a food miles approach to agriculture.
Posted by John Thackara at February 18, 2007 03:50 PM
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