Sustainability, Resources, Environment
Food Miles - A Position Statement

The Packaging Council of Australia has considered the growing trend of certain consumer groups to consider ‘food miles' in their purchase decisions and has issued the following Position Statement:

With climate change now top of the environmental agenda, campaigners are picking out examples of unsustainable business practices that must be changed.
Food, they say, should be sourced from as close as possible to the point of consumption, to reduce transport costs, allow fresh foods to be sold without being prepackaged, and give small outlets a better chance to compete.

An article on the BBC website claims that things are getting worse (www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.html). Milk and potatoes can be sent miles to be packaged at a central depot and then sent back to be sold near where they were first produced.

Ingredients travel around the country from factory to factory before reaching the shops. Meanwhile the amount of food flown into the UK doubled in the 1990's and rising each year. In addition, the European Environment Agency has commented, without providing any evidence, that environmental impact could be lowered if there was more preference for organically grown or local, seasonal foods.

The ‘food miles' concept is a powerful campaigning tool, and the dangers to Australia's export trade are obvious. If the critics are right, there also needs to be big changes in the way that food is produced for the domestic market.

But is it really as simple as that? A recent study from Lincoln University in New Zealand (Saunders & others 2006) concluded that the issue is not distance but total energy use from production to plate including transport. Analysis shows that NZ products have lower energy and emissions per tonne of product delivered to the UK market than foods produced nearer to the market.

The New Zealanders have a vested interest, but UK researchers are saying much the same thing. The BBC website didn't mention that the study they cited, by AEA Technology for the UK government (DEFRA 2005), concluded that a single indicator based on total food kilometres is an adequate indicator of sustainability, as it all depends on the mode of transport.

Air transport has a very high climate change impact per tonne carried but sea transport is relatively efficient. Large heavy goods vehicles travelling long distances via central distribution centres facilitate efficient loading, which reduces environmental impact per tonne of food, where as the mileage saved through local sourcing may be offset by use of smaller vehicles or lower load factors.

The Manchester Business School warns that few studies cover the entire ‘farm to fork' lifecycle and that impacts on water resources are rarely included, even though food production and processing accounts for the majority of water use globally.

Since there is a wide variation in the agricultural impacts of food grown in different parts of the world, global sourcing could be a better environmental option for particular foods. Refrigeration adds to the impacts from electricity generation, but by preventing food wastage it could have a positive environmental impact overall.

The Manchester study (DEFRA 2007) says that the environmental impacts of car-based shopping (and subsequent home cooking for some foods) seem to be greater than those of transport within the distribution system.

A 2005 report for the UK Department for the Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA 2005) states that a single indicator based on total food kilometres travelled is not a valid indicator of sustainability or the environmental impact of the food we eat. The impacts of food transport are complex and involve many trade-offs between different factors. For example, the report shows that it may be less environmentally friendly to grow British tomatoes than it is to import tomatoes from Spain. The energy needed to heat the glass houses for growing tomatoes in Britain is significantly more than the energy used in transporting tomatoes from Spain, where no heating is used because of the warmer climate.

Over the last 30 years, there has been endless analysis of the resource-efficiency of packaging systems. We know that since the resources needed for packaging are only one-tenth of the resources used for the typical foodstuff, under-packaging is a greater waste of resources than over-packaging; but now it's time for studies which integrate product and the packaging to identify overall resource-efficiency in production, distribution and consumption. The food miles campaigners were right to draw attention to this issue, but now we need data rather than slogans. This PCA position may be accessed from http://pca.org.au/ (click on packaging on the web)

Reference
DEFRA. 2005. The Validity of Food Miles as an indicator of Sustainable Development. http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/final.pdf
DEFRA. 2007. Environmental Impact of Food Production and Consumption. http://www.mbs.ac.uk/404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/researchcasestudies/detra.aspx and www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/sae.research/themes/food.htm
Saunders, C, Barber, A & Taylor, G, 2006. Food Miles - Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand's Agriculture Industry. Research Report No. 285. Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit Lincoln University. Link to full document via http://search.live.com/results.aspx?FORM=DNSAS&q=www.lincoln.au.nz%2fstory9430.html