Environment

Kenyan farmers association wades into food miles debate.

Hasit Shah – Kenyan farmer

Farmers in developing countries across the Commonwealth face an uncertain future as climate change takes its toll on their lives and livelihoods.

Over successive seasons, Hasit Shah, a successful farmer from Kenya, has been grappling with the ‘double whammy’ of a lack of rain and soaring temperatures.

Rivers such as the Mara, famous to television audiences as the crossing point for Africa’s wildebeest, are fast drying up, their once mud-soaked banks today cracking under the glare of the sun, he says.

‘The rains just haven’t come. We normally get two rainy seasons a year, in April–May and then again in November. But the rains last year pretty much failed’, Mr Shah explains. ‘As a country we are now beginning to struggle quite badly’.

Enticed by the abnormal heat, insects usually confined to the plains are making their way to land high up in the hills. These creatures lay eggs and mine into the crops, further damaging the planters’ chances of a decent harvest.

As chair of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya, Mr Shah was asked by the Commonwealth Secretariat to contribute to a new report on the impact of climate change on trade and sustainable development in countries.

Carbon footprint of freighted exports
Stemming from commitments made in the Lake Victoria Action Plan – the 2007 declaration by Commonwealth leaders which recognised climate change as a ‘direct threat to the very survival’ of some countries – Mr Shah’s contribution to the report looks at the hotly contested issue of food miles and carbon-labelling.

Proponents of the food miles agenda claim that the further fruit and vegetables are freighted from source to consumer the more damage is caused to the climate through carbon emissions from transportation by air, sea or road.

Supermarkets keen to demonstrate their concern for the environment are turning to special labels or stickers to mark out products with a high ‘food mileage’, asserting that they are empowering consumers to make choices between items freighted in from overseas or sourced more locally.

But Mr Shah refutes the value of this ‘crude’ form of labelling, insisting that calculating carbon emissions solely on methods of transport is at best simplistic and at worst misleading.

In his view, by singling out just one part of the carbon footprint of food – namely transport – these labelling schemes are ‘ignoring other parts of the process’, such as emissions caused by processing, storage and purchase.

He adds that they also neglect the fact that many exporters in countries like Kenya produce ‘goods with lower carbon emissions as compared to their counterparts in developed countries, which produce out-of-season vegetables in a highly mechanised fashion in greenhouses using large amounts of carbon-intensive fertiliser input’.

In regions which do not support large-scale agricultural industries during winter months, the alternative to importing fresh foods from countries like Kenya is to turn to refrigerators or greenhouses to store food for months on end. But, insists Mr Shah, the carbon emissions created through storage often outweigh those emitted by long haul travel.

Expanding the debate beyond food miles
‘It makes sense to grow your products in the tropics’, he says. ‘This refrigerated stuff emits much more in terms of global warming and fluorocarbons and other gases. It’s much, much worse’.

What are food miles?
‘Food miles’ refers to the distance food is transported from its source to consumers and is seen as a measure of the ‘carbon footprint’ created by its consumption. However, the concept ignores emissions associated with farming, processing, storage and means of shopping, all of which have a significant impact on total carbon emissions.

The food miles agenda, adds Mr Shah, belies the fact that many of the planes used to transport produce are not specially chartered – they are already carrying passengers. ‘The flights are going to fly anyway because tourists are going to keep coming to Africa on holiday’, he says.

‘You have got major industries in Europe and the UK that bring everything from bank notes to machines – cars, wine and whisky – which travel by air’.

But perhaps most worryingly, asserts Mr Shah, the ‘labelling and shaming’ of freighted products risks strangling agricultural production in developing countries which are heavily reliant on exporting fresh foods.

For this Kenyan farmer, the choice is clear. Rather than relying on ill-thought through supermarket schemes, the emissions debate needs to be expanded to include not just transportation, but the ‘total carbon emissions of a product through the supply chain’.

The fallout from an effective boycott of foodstuffs from Kenya hardly bears contemplation, he says: ‘Our horticulture sector employs between 250,000 to 300,000 smallholders, plus another 250,000 people on the farms. Each one has got an average minimum family of five.

‘So you are talking about putting two to three million people out of jobs, who don’t have food, medical health care, education – nothing’.