Does shipping an apple half way around the world make sense?I was introduced to an apple grower from New Zealand the other night at a party. He was in Europe visiting his major fruit distribution customers. Of course I had to ask him his views on food miles. There has been a great deal of publicity about this over the last couple of years and we’re all supposed to be looking more carefully at the country of origin labels when we’re shopping. This guy gave a fairly derisory snort and said the supermarkets had made a big deal of this in an attempt to make themselves look good. He has a totally different take on the matter. Now you might say ‘He would, wouldn’t he’ and you’d have a point. But I think he also has a point which is that the growers in New Zealand are far more productive than apple growers in this part of the world. The combination of weather and soil means that they can produce about 4 times the quantity of apples per acre of a grower in Ireland or the UK. So if you take a complete view of the environmental impact of growing an apple the better utilisation of resources outweighs the fairly low amount of CO2 created by shipping the product. His view is that food should be grown where the highest levels of productivity are and then shipped to where it is needed. He feels our focus on locally grown food is misguided. It’s an example of the difficulty facing consumers (and indeed business managers) when trying to do the right thing for the environment. It’s hard to get the definitive view on what is really the best action to take. For example we’ve been told that we should avoid packaging. But as an article in the Sunday Times ‘Eat Me … And Save the Planet’ points out, wrapping that makes food last longer and more likely to be eaten rather than thrown out is a good thing. So the plastic wrapping that seems redundant on a cucumber actually makes the cucumber last in the shop for about two weeks rather than 3 days. As consumers we need useful advice and guidance on these issues rather than marketing spin. Currently most people are just confused. Add a CommentYour comment will appear once it has been approved. |