Nayan Chanda, Straits Times 13 May 08;
SKYROCKETING food prices have finally dampened the enthusiasm for biofuels. But in Europe a new fad is catching on to save the environment: labelling imported food so that consumers can choose local food, which requires less transportation and thus supposedly less consumption of fossil fuels. In reality, it might end up hurting the world's poor without making any dent in global warming.
Rising energy prices and concern over climate change once led to a stampede to turn food crops into biofuel. Now, neo-nationalism and environmentalism are pushing European businesses to adopt quick fixes like slapping labels indicating foreign origin.
British supermarket giant Tesco, which last year sought to pacify environmentalists by putting 'air- freighted' labels on imported fresh fruit and vegetables, has launched a new campaign of 'carbon labelling' grocery items that would supposedly reveal how much carbon was released in their production, and transport.
Although environmental scientists have difficulty agreeing on how to calculate the carbon cost of a product, Tesco has jumped on the green-market wagon. The onus is now on shoppers to save the world by checking the emission costs of products in the same way they might the caloric content listed on cereal boxes. Carbon labelling will become another tool in the hands of protectionists.
Tesco has been one of the earliest to warm to the environmental slogan about curbing the food mile - the distance food has to travel from the farm to the dinner table - by slapping aeroplane icon stickers on imported food. The label is supposed to warn consumers that eating foreign imports is tantamount to increasing global warming.
Such a simplistic analysis ignores the much higher carbon emissions resulting from growing the same vegetables in Europe's greenhouses, using chemical fertilisers or keeping them in cold storage for months. And the gain? The boycott of air-freighted African produce, for example, according to an estimate, would cut Britain's total emissions by less than 0.1 per cent. The net result of such a misguided choice would be to deny poor farmers in developing countries the benefits of globalisation while increasing rather than curbing global warming.
For over a century, since the arrival of refrigerated ships, Britain has imported fresh food, improving the island's diet while providing new opportunities to farmers abroad. Queen Victoria dined on the first consignment of frozen Australian lamb to arrive in London in 1880.
Thanks to liberalisation of trade and falling air-freight costs, the world's non-traditional food producers have found ways to access the world market. The availability of fresh fruit from the tropics during the northern hemisphere's winter offered a healthy and cheap alternative. Since 1996, the total export value of fresh fruit worldwide has more than doubled to US$11 billion (S$15 billion) in 2003. Rising health consciousness allowed farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to join the world supply chain. The burgeoning horticultural trade has opened new avenues to farmers in Asia and South America as well.
Traditional methods of farming with organic fertiliser and non-mechanised irrigation not only produced agricultural products that address the West's environmental concerns, but also provide jobs to people who would otherwise be left out of the globalised network. Although rising CO2 emission from increased global freight demands attention, an aeroplane sticker on a packet of beans is hardly a solution. Other factors such as cold storage, greenhouses and high-energy production cost also need to be worked into calculation of carbon footprint.
A policy that focuses exclusively or mainly on the transport content to calculate a product's carbon footprint helps neither the climate nor the producers or consumers. There has to be an agreed framework to calculate the lifetime carbon costs of a product - from the seed to the dining table - before poor farmers are denied their paltry gains by the very countries whose industrialisation is responsible for the build-up of greenhouse gases.
These feel-good policies will likely fail to reduce carbon emissions substantially while delivering a blow to those with the smallest of carbon footprints.
The author is director of publications at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation and editor of YaleGlobal Online.
