Food Politics…

Sullivan at The Atlantic is citing Ronald Bailey’s report “demolishing the food miles farce.”

In the United States, a 2007 analysis found that transporting food from producers to retailers accounted for only 4 percent of greenhouse emissions related to food. According to a 2000 study, agriculture was responsible for 7.7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In that study, food transport accounted for 14 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, which means that food transport is responsible for about 1 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Food miles advocates fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity. Transporting food is just one relatively small cost of providing modern consumers with their daily bread, meat, cheese, and veggies. Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment.

Bailey’s conclusion are correct, to the extent that people eat bananas, which really can only be economically grown in tropical zones. Bananas, though, don’t account for the majority of anyone’s diet. The following chart indicates those grains which account for the majority of the global shipping.

The majority of what the world eats, and therefore ships, fall on 4 key grains, which together account for more tonnage shipping than the other 26 foods combined in the chart: wheat, corn, rice and barley. Bananas aren’t even on the chart. There are literally thousands of varieties of corn, rice, wheat and barley, which have been adapted to grow in almost every climate. In fact, all of the top 4 can be found growing, economically, from the tropics to the arctic. Even arctic, rocky, volcanic Iceland is capable of producing all 4 crops.

Yet despite the versatility of such crops, we still rely on far away industrialized agriculture to provide most of our diet, and the reason is that the historically low price of fuel has allowed us to concentrate and specialize our agriculture to certain regions. Most of our cereals in this country are produced in the plains states, our vegetables in California and poultry and pork to the South, and those products are then shipped across the country from those locations because of the benefit of cheap fuel. The system reinforces itself too, cheap Plains states cereals are shipped to the South to feed chickens. Guano is collected from Southern chicken farms and used for fertilizers out West, and etc.. The system works and works well, economically speaking, to the extent that we have cheap fuels for transportation.

Cheap fuels, however, are not likely to continue to be a reality. Grains grown in South Dakota fall at the same latitude and growing season as grains to be grown in New York, yet most New Yorkers still rely on Western grains. To drive through Western New York and it becomes immediately evident that those crops can and are grown successfully there; there are fields and fields of corn, yet hardly any are intended for human consumption. The majority is “field corn” or corn grown to supplement cow feed for local dairy production.  However, besides for the economics of cheap fuel, there is no real reason not to diversify.

So while carbon emissions from food transport may represent a small part of overall emissions, its important to the extent that its an unsustainable and soon to be economically irrelevant portion. Also, when we’re talking about reducing carbon emissions globally by a certain date by 10%, 20%, 40% – that 1% becomes all the more significant.

-Marc-