Air freight bad, local good?

At the end of May, The Soil Association launched a public consultation on the issue of air freighting organic food.  Here, their Director of Communications, Robin Maynard, considers the conundrums.

"The notion of ‘Food Miles’ only recently entered the mainstream, with excessive journeying of food from field to plate now generally thought to be 'bad'.  Notorious examples, such as the ingredients of a well-known brand of yoghurt circumnavigating the world several times before arriving on our supermarket shelves, exposed the environmental costs of the global food trade.

People choose to buy organic food for a range of reasons, a key one being that organic farming methods are more environmentally friendly. Studies show organic farms support more bugs, birds, bats, beetles and butterflies than non-organic farms. And organic farming also uses typically 30% less energy to grow crops and raise livestock.  Justifiably, we refer to organic produce as ‘climate-friendly’ food. So surely the Soil Association would automatically be against air freight?

Despite its high profile as an indicator of unsustainability, air freight makes up a very small percentage of total UK food miles, just 1% overall. For organic, it's even smaller- less than half a percent of Soil Association licensees use air freight.  However, air transport produces far more greenhouse gas emissions per 'food mile' than any other form of freight. That 1% of total food miles pumps out 11% of all carbon emissions from UK food transport.  In comparison, shipping, which accounts for 65% of all food miles, produces a relatively low 12% of carbon emissions.

With such a small proportion of organic food air freighted, banning this form of transport would seem to offer the Soil Association an easy, pain-free win. But there's more to the story. Air freight's rapid route to premium paying markets means that producers in developing countries get a bigger cut of the final price of a product, especially if processing takes place in the country of origin.  One of the Soil Association's licensees, Blue Skies, has captured extra value for local producers by cutting and packing a distinctive local, sweet pineapple in Ghana where it is grown, before flying it out to the UK.  That crucial extra margin has enabled the company to provide the small farming communities growing the pineapples with clean drinking water, medical facilities and access to schooling for their children.  The result is a sustainable development project worthy of showcasing on Comic Relief.  Not unexpectedly, Oxfam and other aid agencies have expressed their concern about the Soil Association’s focus on air freight, though no decision has yet been reached as to the wide range of options under consideration in the year long consultation.

If the issues around air freight are more ambiguous than they seem, so too are those surrounding the apparently unquestionably virtuous, local food.  The Soil Association has been in the vanguard of linking farmers more directly with their customers.  The first organic veg box scheme was set up by a Soil Association grower in 1991 - over 500 now exist.

But despite this welcome renaissance in local food networks, there is no absolute definition of what is meant by 'local produce'.  Pioneers in the revival of farmers markets used a 30 mile radius as a general measure, but this was too prescriptive for London markets and 'within 100 miles of the M25' became a practical measure.  Regional food initiatives include criteria for produce where the main ingredient is raised or grown in the area - so 'Lincolnshire plum bread’ may be made from local wheat and plums, but other ingredients may have travelled much further afield.  Nor does ‘local’ define the method of production. Turkey products from Bernard Mathews’ turkey processing plant could be described as from local Norfolk turkeys (at least the bits of them that hadn’t come from Hungary). Buying produce from your nearby intensive factory-farm or heavy- agrochemical using fruit and vegetable grower is a bit like buying a Japanese car from a local dealer – it might be nominally local, but doesn’t fulfil the public perception of the term.

Inevitably, as interest and market share rises in organic, local, ethical and fair trade food, consumers and the media are looking more closely to see what really lies behind the label.

To input to the Soil Association consultation on air-freight visit: www.soilassociation.org