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Food miles: Is buying local food always better?

Recently,

campaigners have encouraged us to buy local food. This reduces ‘food miles’,

that is, the distance food travels to get from the producer to the retailer.

They reason that the higher the food miles, the more carbon emissions. Buying

local food, therefore, has a lower carbon footprint and is more environmentally

friendly.

However,

the real story is not as simple as that. If our aim is to reduce carbon

emissions, we must look at the whole farming process, not just transportation.

According to a 2008 study, only 11% of carbon emissions in the food production

process result from transportation, and only 4% originated from the final

delivery of the product from the producer to the retailer. Other processes,

including fertilisation, storage, heating and irrigation, contribute much more.

In

fact, imported food often has a lower carbon footprint than locally grown food.

Take apples, for example. In autumn, when apples are harvested, the best option

for a British resident is to buy British apples. However, the apples we buy in

winter or spring have been kept refrigerated for months, and this uses up a lot

of energy. In spring, therefore, it is more energy-efficient to import them

from New Zealand, where they are in season. Heating also uses a lot of energy,

which is why growing tomatoes in heated greenhouses in the UK is less

environmentally friendly than importing them from Spain, where the crop grows

well in the local climate.

We

must also take into account the type of transport. Transporting food by air

creates about 50 times more emissions than shipping it. However, only a small

proportion of goods are flown to the consumer country, and these are usually

high value, perishable items which we cannot produce locally, such as seafood

and out-of-season berries. Even then, these foods may not have a higher carbon

footprint than locally grown food. For example, beans flown in from Kenya are

grown in sunny fields using manual labour and natural fertilisers, unlike in

Britain, where we use oil-based fertilisers and diesel machinery. Therefore,

the total carbon footprint is still lower.

It’s

also worth remembering that a product’s journey does not end at the

supermarket. The distance consumers travel to buy their food, and the kind of

transport they use will also add to its carbon footprint. So driving a long way

to shop for food will negate any environmental benefits of buying locally grown

produce. Furthermore, choosing local over imported food can also badly affect

people in developing countries. Many of them work in agriculture because they

have no other choice. If they are unable to sell produce overseas, they will

have less income to buy food, clothes, medicine and to educate their children.

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