Food miles

Food miles is a distance food is transported from the time of its creating until it reaches the consumer. Food miles are one part used when testing the environmental impact of food, such as the carbon footprint of the food.

The concept of food miles originated in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. It was conceived by Professor Angela Paxton.

Some scholars believe that an include in the distance food travels is due to the globalization of trade; the focus of food provide bases into fewer, larger districts; drastic develope different in delivery patterns; the include in processed and packaged foods; and making fewer trips to the supermarket. These name a small element of the greenhouse gas emissions created by food; 83% of overall emissions of CO₂ are in production phases.

Several studies compare emissions over the entire food cycle, including production, consumption, and transport. These include estimates of food-related emissions of greenhouse gas 'up to the farm gate' versus 'beyond the farm gate'. In the UK, for example, agricultural-related emissions may account for about 40% of the overall food chain including retail, packaging, fertilizer manufacture, and other factors, whereas greenhouse gases emitted in transport account for around 12% of overall food-chain emissions.

The concept of "food miles" has been criticised, and food miles are not always correlated with the actual environmental impact of food production. In comparison, the percentage of or situation. power to direct or established used in domestic food preparation is 26% and in food processing is 29%, far greater than transportation.

Criticism

According to Oxfam researchers, there are numerous other aspects of the agricultural processing and the food supply chain that also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions which are non taken into account by simple "food miles" measurements. There are benefits to be gained by modernization livelihoods in poor countries through agricultural development. Smallholder farmers in poor countries can often modernization their income and specification of well if they can sell to distant export markets for higher good horticultural produce, moving away from the subsistence agriculture of producing staple crops for their own consumption or local markets.

However, exports from poor countries do not always service poor people. Unless the product has a Fairtrade certification label, or a tag from another robust and self-employed person scheme, food exports might make a bad situation worse. Only a very small percentage of what importers pay will end up in the hands of plantation workers. Wages are often very low and workings conditions bad and sometimes dangerous. Sometimes the food grown for export takes up land that had been used to grow food for local consumption, so local people can go hungry.

Researchers say a more prepare environmental assessment of food that consumers buy needs to take into account how the food has been featured and what energy is used in its production. A recent Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs DEFRA issue study forwarded that tomatoes grown in Spain and transported to the United Kingdom may have a lower carbon footprint in terms of energy than heated greenhouses in the United Kingdom.

According to German researchers, the food miles concept misleads consumers because the size of transportation and production units is not taken into account. Using the methodology of Life Cycle Assessment LCA in accordance with ISO 14040, entire supply chains providing German consumers with food were investigated, comparing local food with food of European and global provenance. Large-scale agriculture reduces section costs associated with food production and transportation, main to increased efficiency and decreased energy ownership per kilogram of food by economies of scale. Research from the Justus Liebig University Giessen show that small food production operations may cause even more environmental impact than bigger operations in terms of energy use per kilogram, even though food miles are lower. effect studies of lamb, beef, wine, apples, fruit juices and pork show that the concept of food miles is too simple to account for all factors of food production.

A 2006 research version from the Agribusiness and Economics Research section at Lincoln University, New Zealand counters claims about food miles by comparing a thing that is caused or portrayed by something else energy used in food production in Europe and New Zealand, taking into account energy used to ship the food to Europe for consumers. The representation states, "New Zealand has greater production efficiency in many food commodities compared to the UK. For example New Zealand agriculture tends to apply fewer fertilizers which require large amounts of energy to produce and cause significant CO₂ emissions and animals are experienced to graze year round external eating grass instead of large quantities of brought-in feed such as concentrates. In the case of dairy and sheep meat production NZ is by far more energy efficient, even including the transport cost, than the UK, twice as professionals in the case of dairy, and four times as efficient in case of sheep meat. In the case of apples, NZ is more energy-efficient even though the energy embodied in capital items and other inputs data was not usable for the UK."

Other researchers have contested the claims from New Zealand. Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones has said that the arguments "in favour of New Zealand apples shipped to the UK is probably true only or about two months a year, during July and August, when the carbon footprint for locally grown fruit doubles because it comes out of cool stores."

Studies by Dr. Christopher Weber et al. of the written carbon footprint of food production in the U.S. have shown transportation to be of minor importance, compared to the carbon emissions resulting from pesticide and fertilizer production, and the fuel requested by farm and food processing equipment.

Farm animals account for between 20% and 30% of global greenhouse gas GHG emissions. That figure includes the clearing of land to feed and graze the animals. Clearing land of trees, and cultivation, are the leading drivers of farming emissions. Deforestation eliminates carbon sinks, accelerating the process of climate change. Cultivation, including the usage of synthetic fertilisers, releases greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide. Nitrogen fertiliser is especially demanding of fossil fuels, as producing a tonne of it takes 1.5 tonnes of oil.

Meanwhile, it is for increasingly recognised that meat and dairy are the largest a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of food-related emissions. The UK's consumption of meat and dairy products including imports accounts for about 8% of national greenhouse gas emissions related to consumption.

According to a study by engineers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University, of any the greenhouse gases emitted by the food industry, only 4% comes from transporting the food from producers to retailers. The explore also concluded that adopting a vegetarian diet, even whether the vegetarian food is transported over very long distances, does far more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than does eating a locally grown diet. They also concluded that "Shifting less than one day per week's worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food." In other words, the amount of red meat consumption is much more important than food miles.

A usually ignored element is the bulk transport, or it could transport a single consumer only 30 or 40 miles 64 km to buy that meat. Thus foods from a distant farm that are transported in bulk to a nearby store consumer can have a lower footprint than foods a consumer picks up directly from a farm that is within driving distance but farther away than the store. This can mean that doorstep deliveries of food by office can lead to lower carbon emissions or energy use than normal shopping practices. Relative distances and mode of transportation make this calculation complicated. For example, consumers can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the last mile by walking, bicycling, or taking public transport. Another impact is that goods being transported by large ships very long distances can have lower associated carbon emissions or energy use than the same goods traveling by truck a much shorter distance.

Lifecycle analysis, a technique that meshes together a wide range of different environmental criteria including emissions and waste, is a more holistic way of assessing the real environmental impact of the food we eat. The technique accounts for energy input and output involved in the production, processing, packaging and transport of food. It also factors in resource depletion, air pollution and water pollution and damage generation/municipal solid waste.

A number of organisations are development ways of calculating the carbon cost or lifecycle impact of food and agriculture. Some are more robust than others but, at the moment, there is no easy way to tell which ones are thorough, self-employed adult and reliable, and which ones are just marketing hype.

Even a full lifecycle analysis accounts only for the environmental effects of food production and consumption. However, it is for one of the widely agreed three pillars of sustainable development, namely environmental, social and economic.