Fairtrade vs food miles

from ic Wales

By Steve Brooks, Acting Head of Oxfam Cymru

What do you do? Buy the fair trade strawberries from Kenya or the asparagus tips from Pembrokeshire?

It’s a dilemma more and more of us will face. We all want to do our bit to help make poverty history and protect the environment from climate change, but what happens when our concern for people appears to clash with our concern for the planet?

Put more simply, should we avoid fair trade goods from the developing world to help cut down on food miles?

For some, the initial answer is obvious: surely opting for food transported halfway across the globe is “worse” than buying produce grown locally? Isn’t importing produce from different continents just adding to climate change?

Well, actually no.Firstly, the technical bit: food miles is only a measure of the amount of carbon emitted by taking food from one place to another – the distance it’s travelled from where it is grown or raised to where it is consumed. What it doesn’t measure is the before and after. Strawberries grown in the shadow of the Preseli mountains: low food miles? Maybe. But what about how the crop was fed and watered? And what about electricity-guzzling lights in the heated greenhouses?

So, food miles don’t take into account the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated in production. Substituting tropical production of fruit, veg or flowers with local growing of similar products to reduce food miles may result in a greater volume of emissions because of the energy requirements needed to maintain artificial conditions necessary. We need to start thinking from plough to plate.

Secondly, let’s think about the impact food miles could have on the developing world. More than 70% of people living in poor countries depend on agriculture to make a living. In Africa an estimated 1.5 million people depend on agricultural exports to the UK for a living. For poor people producing and farming the crops that fill our fridges, these livelihoods, some of them founded on fair trade agreements, are the gateway to self-sufficiency, long term sustainable development and ultimately a way to work out of poverty.

Switching away from fair trade and other goods produced in the developing world to cut food miles would be harming those who are least responsible for global warming.

As consumers, were are increasingly understanding the consequences of our purchasing decisions but as Oxfam points out the power of the pound needs to be channelled in the right direction.

And fair trade’s a deeper investment than business. Buying a bag of Fairtrade rice will also support social and economic development projects like schools, clinics, clean water supply and proper sanitation.

So consider this while you’re doing your next weekly shop – food transportation at present contributes relatively little to carbon dioxide emissions. If you and everyone in the UK, switched one 100W light bulb to a low energy equivalent, we would over the course of a year, reduce CO² emissions by 4.7 times the amount which would result from a boycott of fresh fruit and vegetables from sub-Saharan Africa.