I recently came across a short article in Ode Magazine that has made me rethink what I assumed to be a no-brainer in best practices for the environment: buying local food - the idea being that by limiting how much travel food takes to get to me, I shrink my carbon footprint.
The article defies that assumption, suggesting that looking at "food miles" alone is misleading. Based on research from the UK-based Africa Research Institute, it argues that it's actually better for the planet to buy food from African small holders than from local farms.
Indeed, the carbon footprint of most of our food in the West comes overwhelmingly from production (85%) rather than from transportation (15%). Considering that old-fashioned, labor-intensive African agriculture is much less carbon-intensive than mechanized farming of the West, it is gentler on the environment even if you have to fly the food in, especially as food flown in from Africa is transported via passenger aircrafts that would be making the trip anyways, carrying tourists back home.
A further argument favoring the African farmer is that it is also morally right, allowing smaller African farmers access to Western markets, where they have been unable to compete because of agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US.
Two-thirds of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihood and may remain in poverty as long as subsidies are in place. Mark Malloch Brown, former head of UNDP, estimated that farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports:
"It is the extraordinary distortion of global trade, where the West spends $360 billion a year on protecting its agriculture with a network of subsidies and tariffs that costs developing countries about US$50 billion in potential lost agricultural exports. Fifty billion dollars is the equivalent of today's level of development assistance."
After reading that first article, I also came across this one, written in the New York Times, a few years ago which gives concrete examples and concludes that:
"We must be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts".
While I still believe supporting local farmers using sustainable practices is a good thing, I am no longer going to stop myself from buying foreign-born food under the pretense that it's wrong. That said, I look forward to the day where we finally invest in alternative energies, making food miles even more irrelevant.
