What are food miles?
Thanks in part to concerns about climate change, more people are stopping to consider the impact that everyday goods - including food - have on the environment. Food miles, the distance food travels from field to plate, is a way of indicating the environmental impact of the food we eat. Half the vegetables and 95 per cent of the fruit eaten in the UK comes from beyond the shores.
Increasingly, it arrives by plane - and air travel gives off more CO2 than any other form of transport. Agriculture and food account for nearly 30 per cent of goods trucked around Britain's roads and, according to a Government report in 2005, the resulting road congestion, accidents and pollution cost the country £9bn a year.
"Food-miles are a great metaphor for looking at the localness of food, the contrast between local and global food, a way people can get an idea of where their food is coming from," said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.
The end of the road for food miles?
Dr Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, coined the term ‘food miles’ in the 1990s. While the idea of food miles has become common currency, many other processes contribute to the carbon footprint of our food. Agriculture, processing, storage and the way we shop all have to be factored into the bigger carbon emissions picture.
"The most political act we do on a daily basis is to eat, as our actions affect farms, landscapes and food businesses," said co-author Professor Jules Pretty, from the University of Essex, UK.
Air grievance
The fresh fruit and vegetables arriving by plane from across the globe clock up the most contentious food miles. Reducing the carbon footprint of food is not as simple as choosing not to buy fresh fruit and vegetables flown in from Africa or South America, however.
Although airfreighted produce accounts for less than one per cent of total UK food miles, it is responsible for around 11 per cent of the total CO2 emissions from UK food transport. That's because transport by plane generates 177 times more greenhouse gases than shipping does, for example, and it's the fastest-growing way of moving food around, according to latest figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
The most recent increase is affected by imports of animal feed from Brazil and the USA, but it is the green beans grown in Kenya, 70 per cent of which are destined for UK supermarkets, that draw much of the anti-air freight fire.
Because of concerns about the carbon emissions generated by airfreighting, Marks and Spencer and Tesco now label fresh produce flown in from abroad with a sticker depicting an airplane.
Miles in the balance
Others believe that highlighting the fact that the food is airfreighted can demonize such produce and threaten the livelihoods of some of the world's poorest people, who are dependent on exporting by plane. The £200million fresh fruit and vegetable trade with the UK supports one million people living in Africa.
To support environmentally friendly food production without unnecessarily harming vulnerable developing economies, the Soil Association has decided that, in order to qualify as 'organic', all air-freighted food will have to meet ethical trade standards from 2009. Incidentally most Fair-trade fruit, such as pineapples, bananas and mangoes, is transported by sea.
Lorry loads
Food transport is responsible for 25 per cent of the kilometers clocked up by HGVs on our congested roads. Supermarkets have national distribution systems, so even food grown near a particular branch may have traveled by lorry to a central depot and back to its place of origin. Ingredients used in the food processing industry travel around the country from factory to factory before reaching the shops.
All these journeys around Britain mean that HGVs transporting food transport are responsible for a quarter of CO2 emissions.
Car culprits
It's easy to overlook the fact that the food we eat clocks up extra miles on the drive to the supermarket and back. The last set of figures looking at the distance food travels found a seven per cent increase in city car journeys making longer and more frequent trips to the shops. Cars are responsible for 20 per cent of the UK's CO2 emissions from food transport.
Is home-grown always better?
Local food is usually more "green" than organic food, according to a report published in the journal Food Policy.
Even locally grown and organic food can be kept chilled for months. Refrigeration requires energy; trying to cheat our climate by growing fruit and vegetables outside their natural season is also contributing to climate change.
A 2005 DEFRA report indicated that it can be more energy-efficient to import tomatoes from Spain by lorry than to grow them in a heated greenhouse in the UK. Lettuce grown out of season in the UK also compared unfavorably with Spanish salad when total carbon emissions were measured.
A study carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand concluded that rearing and distributing British lamb produces more CO2 emissions than importing the meat 11,000 miles by sea. New Zealand farmers use more renewable energy and less fertilizer, so agriculture is much more energy efficient than the UK's, making up for the food miles.
Carbon 'footprint'
"The price of food is disguising externalised costs - damage to the environment, damage to climate, damage to infrastructure and the cost of transporting food on roads," Professor Lang told the BBC News website.
Different farming systems use varying amounts of energy. The reckoning of all the carbon emissions produced in the growing, processing and distribution of our food starts in the field. Measuring the environmental impact, from fork to plate, is known as the life cycle.
Organic farming uses less energy because it relies much less heavily on fertilisers and chemicals used in intensive farming, the manufacture of which creates greenhouse gases.
Meat is the most energy-intensive of all foods to produce, taking up larger amounts of water than any other food production - 2,400 liters of water to produce a 150g hamburger compared to 13 liters of water for a 70g tomato. Cows give off methane, which contributes to global warming, too. Livestock rearing generates more greenhouse gases than transport does.
Processing and packaging also contribute to food's carbon footprint, as does keeping it chilled or frozen. All these carbon emissions can outweigh those produced by food miles.
Is there still mileage in food miles?
While some think the term food miles will be superseded by a life cycle carbon footprint, it is still important to keep track of the distance food travels.
Food miles have jump-started the debate about the carbon footprint of our food. Paul Steedman of the Food Ethics Council insists they're still a valuable concept, although only one component of the life cycle of food. 'It's heartening the way people are now thinking about the ethics of food, and we don't want to throw the baby out of the bathwater,' says Steedman.
He and others would argue that comparing English and New Zealand apples in July and finding that the imports score lower on carbon emissions is a red herring, because consumers shouldn't expect to eat apples out of season and that supermarkets shouldn't be selling unseasonal fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. That way, he argues, the responsibility wouldn't lie with shoppers having to weigh up which foods are better for the environment.
Carbon labeling
But a global food economy seems here to stay and consumers will doubtless continue to demand the out-of-season produce that they've grown used to. The challenge is to reduce the impact food production has on climate change.
By working out a way of measuring how much CO2 is given off at every stage of production that's partly what the Carbon Trust is helping organizations to do. Look for the pilot label showing the carbon emission in grams on Walkers cheese and onion crisps. Innocent smoothies are being measured and already the fruits' journey from India has been shown to make up less than a quarter of the carbon emission tally on its mango and passion fruit smoothie.
Following a pledge by its chief executive Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco is working with the Carbon Trust to map the carbon footprint of foods including tomatoes, potatoes and orange juice. Companies opting for the Carbon Trust scheme must commit to reducing emissions or lose the right to use the label.
Only when several similar foods have their carbon footprint measured can shoppers choose their foods accordingly. Until then, shopping locally for what's grown locally (and, preferably, organically) and in season may be the only guarantee that the food we buy is doing the least possible damage to our environment.
SOME VIDEOS ON FOOD MILES
http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dcy1uNxzHjfA
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQ2x3hmXs
FOOD MILES WITH RELEVANCE TO INDIA
ENVIRONMENT
Foods with History
The ecological price we are paying for exotic foods
SUMATI NAGRATH
11 Jan 2008
KNOW YOUR GREENS: Bananas are flown 5,000km from India; cherry tomatoes fly 9,000km from the US, onions
from New Zealand fly 19,000km and green beans travel over 6,800km, all to provide the citizens of UK with seasonal fruits and vegetables, all year around.
Twenty-six-year-old Sarah Rudd, who lives in the small town of Rugby in the UK, has never been abroad. She has not even been inside an airplane. But the food she eats has in fact, most of the fruits and vegetables neatly stocked in her fridge have travelled thousands of kilometres from far-flung countries. The onions she picked up from her local supermarket have travelled over 19,000 km from New Zealand, the green beans around 6,800 km from Kenya, the cherry tomatoes almost 9,000 km from the US and the bananas have travelled 5,000 km all the way from India.
In India, meanwhile, mention of the term food miles invites blank expressions and requires much explanation. But this is not necessarily a result of apathy or unawareness. It would appear that we in India simply do no clock up significant food miles. Being the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world; foods such as kiwis, asparagus and pak-choi are also grown in parts of the country minimises the need to import. In India we are lucky that most of our fresh produce is procured locally, all across the hotel industry says Niranjan Khatri, general manager of Welcomenviron Initiatives, a division of ITCWelcomgroup
Hotels.
We do import some exotic foods such as certain varieties of cheese but it is so expensive that there are few takers. Given that transportation costs of flying in produce are almost prohibitive, he says in some ways economic concerns are actually helping the environmental ones.
Indian food retailers such as Reliance Fresh, too, source locally, with imports such as Chinese apples forming a minuscule proportion of their total stock. Our big concern is how to strengthen the supply chain in order to minimise wastage, which can amount to almost 40 per cent,says a Reliance Industries spokesperson.
Given that we have so much local produce easily available, imports just don’t make sense. It would seem that a combination of abundance of produce and prohibitive transportation costs mean that we in India don’t have to worry about food miles, yet.
In the West, however, as concerns over climate change grow, the distances travelled by food are coming under greater scrutiny and retailers are responding to heightened consumer awareness through a variety of measures. We find that our consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment and want to know the provenance of food products, especially fresh produce, says Greg Sage, international corporate affairs manager of Tesco, the UKbased
retail giant. We have clear labelling that indicates not just the country of origin but also the mode of transportation used to import it so that customers can make an informed choice.
Many countries, including the US, the UK and even India import bottled mineral water from France, Fiji and Norway among others. Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the transportation of bottled water within and between countries also contributes to global warming.
It’s worse in India, where there are hundreds of small-scale producers who indiscriminately draw precious groundwater for their business. Besides contributing to water scarcity, this also creates social tensions between the hard-hit local community, specially in
tier-II and tier-III towns and villages, and the bottling plant owners.
A Question Of Livelihood
Now the pressure is on from farmers groups, the government and consumers want food retailers to source more and more produce locally, organically and according to season. But will doing that really ease environmental impact?
Firstly, there is a real dilemma in the case of organic produce. Traditionally consumers opt for organic foods, not only because they are more wholesome but also because organic production includes less energy use and therefore lower greenhouse emissions. However, if organic products are transported long-distance, particularly by air, the emissions are far greater than the reduced emissions resulting from organic, rather than conventional farming.
THE RELIANCE REVOLUTION IN INDIA
Reliance Fresh is the convenience store format which forms part of the retail business of of Reliance Industries of India which is headed by Mukesh Ambani. Reliance plans to invest in excess of Rs 25000 crores in the next 4 years in their retail division. The company already has in excess of 560 reliance fresh outlets across the country. These stores sell fresh fruits and vegetables, staples, groceries, fresh juice bars and dairy products.
A typical Reliance Fresh store is approximately 3000-4000 square. feet and caters to a catchment area of 1-2 kms.
Post launch, in a dramatic shift in its positioning and mainly due to the circumstances prevaling in UP, West Bengal and Orissa, it was mentioned recently in news Dailies that, Reliance Retail is moving out of stocking fruits and vegetables. Reliance Retail has decided to minimise its exposure in the fruit and vegetable business and position Reliance Fresh as a pure play super market focusing on categories like food, FMCG, home, consumer durables, IT and wellness , with food accounting for the bulk of the business. The company may not stock fruit and vegetables in some states, Orissa being one of them. Though Reliance Fresh is not exiting the fruit and vegetable business altogether, it has decided not to compete with local vendors partly due to political reasons, and partly due to its inability to create a robust supply chain. This is quite different from what the firm had originally planned. When the first Reliance Fresh store opened in Hyderabad last October, not only did the company said the store’s main focus would be fresh produce like fruits and vegetables at a much lower price, but also spoke at length about its “farm-to-fork’’ theory. The idea the company spoke about was to source from farmers and sell directly to the consumer removing middlemen out of the way.
Reliance Fresh, Reliance Mart, Reliance Digital, Reliance Trendz, Reliance Footprint, Reliance Wellness, Reliance Jewels, Reliance Timeout and Reliance Super are various formats that Reliance has rolled out.
In addition, Reliance Retail has entered into an alliance with Apple for setting up a chain of Apple Specialty Stores branded as iStore, starting with Bangalore
Controversy
Recently their stores in Jharkand faced the ire of mobs comprising of local vegetable vendors. They vandalised and attacked the stores claiming that they were stealing their livelihoods.[1]
In August 2007, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati ordered to close 10 new stores keeping view of Law & order situation. In November 2007, Reliance Fresh stores are attacked by Bharatiya Janshakti Party supporters headed by Uma Bharti.
Reliance plans to do a Wal-Mart in India
Hemangi Balse & Reeba Zachariah in Mumbai
July 30, 2004 09:17 IST
India's Rs 22,500 crore (Rs 225 billion) retailing industry is set to witness a tectonic shift -- Reliance Industries is leaping into the industry with a vengeance.
If all goes well, the group's retail venture could one day wind up being India's equivalent of Wal-Mart.
The Ambani enterprise is looking at a huge retailing push, which will cover the entire retailing ambit, including perhaps setting up shopping malls and hyper malls all over the country, though no final decision has been taken on this.
The malls will hawk everything, catering not just to mid to high-end customers but also to the mass market. In short, Reliance Industries will try to give consumers a complete shopping experience.
The foray into retailing is expected to start in the next financial year in one state, after the Reliance group completes the first phase of setting up retail petroleum product outlets and Reliance Infocomm shops.
In this connection, Reliance Industries is said to be talking to producers of consumer non-durables and looking at the imported goods market.
It will pick up products from the manufacturer's gate, transport them to its warehouses (these will dot the country) and deliver them to its shopping complexes nationwide. But if goods lie unsold, it will return them to manufacturers.
A Reliance Industries spokesman declined to comment on the matter. But a senior Reliance executive said: "We started with the big challenge -- in the petroleum and telecom industries. We now know where our customers are and where the market is and what customers want. What we are now looking at is: can we sell something more? These could be any products. This might not involve any substantial additional investment."
It is working on a complex model where it will draw on its expertise in logistics, transportation, warehousing and its ability to offer a large basket of products to consumers from which they can pick and choose.
India has an estimated 4.3 million retail outlets, but the organised retail industry accounts for less than 2 per cent of this.
The organised segment of the industry has grew by 25 per cent last year.
THE INDIAN MANGO MARCHES ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Jamnagar (Gujarat), Sep 22 - It started off as an initiative to green its refinery complex, but Reliance Industries' mangoes are poised to be serious money-spinners with higher profit margins than petroleum products as they make their way to tony stores like Harrods in London as well as the US.
Hital R. Meswani, executive director of diversified Reliance Industries Group, says 'mangoes make more margin (profits) than any of the petroleum products' produced in the third largest refinery in the world.
Last year, Reliance, which cultivates Asia's largest mango plantation covering 470 acres, sold only three tonnes of its 387 tonnes mango crop to Harrods. Most of the fruit was supplied to the company township and to some major chain stores within the country.
It will be different now.
'But next year in June, as against Harrods' demand for 300 tonnes of mango table fruit, pulp and slices, we have agreed to supply 100 tonnes under our Releure brand,' said Reliance Agro Initiative Vice President I.M. Thimaiah, who has helped to create a green belt that includes 32 varieties of fruit trees, some not native to India.
The company is planning to do the grading within the complex and initially uses facilities at ANAND, the milk hub of Gujarat, for preparing and packaging the mango pulp and slices to be sent to Harrods and to stores in the US next June.
'Once volumes go up, Reliance may set up its own food processing unit, have its own reefer vans and cold storage facilities as we would like to minimise waste,' Thimaiah told IANS.
In the case of Japan, the requirement of irradiation process is being seen as a difficult and expensive requirement. Interestingly, while Reliance sold mangoes to Harrods for Rs.40 per kg, the famous London department store was able to retail it for Rs.2,400 per dozen with the Asian community being the largest buyers, Thimaiah said. Thimaiah, who has piloted Reliance agro initiatives in other states keen to replicate the transformation of a barren and semi arid region into a green oasis, sees the fruits of his efforts making it to markets in India and overseas in larger quantities in the years to come.
He narrates how they set about six years ago proving detractors wrong by planting wind breakers to protect mango plantations - now thriving in an area where hardly any tree stump could be seen.
'We have 32 varieties of fruits planted here. The amazing thing is that everything that grows here is extra sweet and juicy,' the man with the green fingers said proudly. The young sapotas, pomellos, grapefruits, Mandarin oranges, figs, hybrid tamarinds, red guavas, Barbados cherries and olives from Spain do his efforts proud. Growing beyond the mandatory green cover requirement of 726 acres within its 8,000 acre refinery complex, Reliance has created a 2,016 acre green belt including 470 acres of mangoes.
Of over 1,000 varieties of mangoes found in India, which is the largest producer and consumer of this fruit, Thimaiah has chosen 110 commercially viable varieties with Kesar covering 80 percent of the 102,000 trees planted.
Based on agriculture practices in Israel and South Africa, Thimaiah has gone in for high-density tree planting techniques to ensure shorter trees with more fruit yield.
As against 7.5 tonnes of mangoes per hectare in Ratnagiri, home to the famous Alphonso mango, the yield in Dhiru Bhai Lakhi Bagh, as the mango orchard is called, is 25 tonnes.
Attempts are on to increase not only the yield through adoption of the South African cultivation technique, but also extend the mango season from March till September and beyond by planting varieties 'from Kanyakumari till Pakistan that will bear fruits beyond the traditional season'.
With grafting of some of overseas favourite mango varieties from Florida, Brazil and Britain among others, Thimaiah is seeking to cater to the Western taste for large, colourful, unblemished and less sweet mangoes.
This will see him create another organic mango orchard in the special economic zone (SEZ) coming up within the complex. Of the 2,200 acre green cover planned in the SEZ refinery and petrochemical facility of over 27 million tonnes capacity for handling any type of crude, 1,000 acres would be devoted to growing mangoes.
Banganapalli from Andhra Pradesh as well as Alphonsos, Kesar, Tommy Atkins and Keitt from Florida and Kent from Britain are some of the large and colourful varieties chosen for planting in the SEZ zone, for which Reliance is planning to get European organic produce certification.
Having proved that arid regions can turn green, Reliance is helping to create awareness and providing two-day training courses to farmers in Gujarat.
New Delhi, June 10 (IANS)
You'll soon be able to tell which orchard your mango came from and if any pesticide was used while it was growing. India is extending the system by which you can trace the life history of a farm product to eight more to ensure quality control.
Under the system, a farm product will have a specific code through which an importer can trace its origin and pesticide residue level in it if he has any doubts.
The eight new items that will be covered by the system are mango, pomegranate, onion, basmati rice, honey, poultry, groundnuts and organic products.
'The traceability system (as it is called) is a requirement of the importers and should cover as many products as possible to ensure their quality. It is a kind of mechanism that offers online the details of a particular product,' said Asit Tripathy, chairman of the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA).
APEDA, India's official agency to monitor export of processed food and farm products, introduced the traceability system in 2006 for monitoring fresh grapes exported from India to Europe. Called Grapenet, it was an Internet-based residue traceability software system.
It now covers over 35,000 grapes growers in India, who have been provided with specific codes.
'If any of the grape producers supply substandard stuff or with a high level of pesticide residue against approved norms, the importer or distributor with the help of bar code on the packet will immediately identify the source of origin and can ensure such items are not passed on to the consumers,' Tripathy told IANS in an interview.
'This mechanism involves monitoring pesticide residue, achieve product standardisation and facilitate tracing back from retail shelves to the grower. The traceability system speaks about various stages of sampling, testing, certification, and packing a product passed through,' said APEDA director S. Dave.
'In a competitive world market, quality management is a core requirement, without which tapping global market effectively becomes a difficult task. Quality holds the key to success in domestic and global market alike,' added Dave.
Will the traceability system help enhance exports?
'Such a system certainly goes a long way in expanding the market base for any product. It shows how much importance a country attaches to transparency in quality management and monitoring,' Dave said.
India's export of fresh grapes crossed over Rs.301 million ($7.2 million) in 2006-07 against Rs.214 million in 2005-06.
Some of the key importers of Indian farm and processed food products like pomegranate, mango, onion and basmati rice are the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, Italy, Germany, Australia, Jordan, Bahrain, and Malaysia.
'During 2007-12, APEDA intends to expand market base for mangoes, pomegranate, grapes, onions, ready-to-eat foods, cut flowers, poultry products, bovine meat and organic products in Japan, the US, China, Indonesia, Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the European Union, the Middle East and Switzerland,' Dave said.
According to the data with APEDA, India exported pomegranates worth Rs.790 million to over 30 countries in 2006-07. The largest chunk was exported to the UAE amounting to over Rs.243 million, followed by the Netherlands (Rs.160 million) and Britain (Rs.147 million).
India exported 79,060.88 million tonnes of fresh mangoes and 156,835.52 million tonnes of mango pulp in 2006-07. Major markets for Indian mangoes are the UAE, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Germany and Hong Kong.
Onion and honey are other farm products being brought under the traceability system. Onion exports earned India Rs.11.63 billion in 2006-07, while natural honey worth Rs.600 million was exported during the same period to the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Belgium and Australia, among others.
'A number of quality control steps have enhanced the competitiveness of Indian farm and processed food products, and their exports have grown from Rs.6.47 billion in 1999-2000 to Rs.24.12 billion in 2006-07,' said Tripathy.
