Soil Association move to tackle air-freight debate
It's always a sad moment when you realise the delicious, environmentally sound, organic-certified banana you're chomping on has been flown in from the other side of the planet, contributing significantly to your carbon footprint, and pretty much cancelling out any 'green' credentials it may at first have appeared to have.
But in a brave attempt to solve this common ethical conundrum, the Soil Association - the body responsible for organic certification in the UK - is considering a total ban on air-freighted products,
to the extent that food flown in from overseas would no longer be
certified organic, regardless of how it had been farmed. This is
certainly good news for shoppers, as not everyone has time to weigh up
the various ethical arguments on every trip to the grocery aisle, and
it can be disheartening to find your best efforts (and not to mention a
few extra quid) are going to waste.
The air-freight ban is just one of many options being looked into by
the Soil Association to tackle climate change, and we'll make sure we
keep you up to date on developments!
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Comments
The air part of the trip contributes an absurdly tiny proportion of the carbon footprint of food - effectively all of the pollution occurs at the stage when it's carted around the UK on lorries or, more importantly, driven out of the supermarket in shoppers' cars.
See e.g. Tim Harford in the FT http://qurl.com/b9s5s or the DEFRA report into the matter from 2005 here http://qurl.com/zfg31.
If people want to reduce the carbon footprint of their food one half of the solution is to walk, not drive, to the shops and carry their food home - easy in cities, hard in rural areas (incidentally another reason that urban living has a far lower environmental impact than rural). The other half of the solution is to require retailers to acquire their food locally and reduce the distance it has to travel by road. Alas, this is a spectacularly unpopular solution with retailers, since acknowledging intra-UK road travel as the real food-miles culprit would tip the balance of power in favour of local suppliers and obviate the retailers' cherished power of bulk purchase. (A conspiracy theorist might suggest that the lobbying power of our largest supermarkets is therefore the reason that so much attention is concentrated, erroneously, on the food miles created by air freight).
Reducing our spending on food from abroad will merely stifle the economies of developing nations - which are generally prevented by America's absurd, failed war on drug from growing the crops that would actually make them the most money, but that's a different problem.
Posted by: Seamus McCauley | February 1, 2007 11:30 AM
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