Supermarkets Urged to Reduce Choice and Meat Sales
Juliette Jowit
October 8, 2008
Juliette Jowit
UK Guardian
Supermarkets will have to abandon their focus on consumer choice and reduce or axe stocks of the most environmentally damaging foods such as meat, dairy and air-freighted fresh products, a new report warns today.
The Food Ethics Council study says improvements in efficiency of the food supply chain have been overtaken by growth in consumption, and also fail to tackle the huge impact of customers driving to shops and growth in emissions overseas.
Emissions from the food industry are still growing, despite calls from the United Nations, and this week from the UK's independent Climate Change Committee for rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, it says.
The report calls for a radical reform of the industry including two "sacred assumptions" that "consumers are king" and that "the economy must grow to survive".
It also backs calls by the UN's head of climate change to eat less meat, warning that the biggest cuts to greenhouse gas emissions will come from changes to diet by eating less meat and more fruit and vegetables, rather than cutting food-miles.
"If we were to arrive at a position where we could do this stuff at zero environmental cost [and] zero social cost, great, but we just don't think it's very likely," said the report's authors, Paul Steedman and Tom MacMillan.
"It's going in the wrong direction despite all those efficiency improvements; the idea in the future we're going to have some magical growing system is just quite far fetched."
The Food Ethics Council conducted a two-year inquiry into food supply, monitored by a steering group of leading food experts, including Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) at Surrey university and Professor Kevin Morgan at Cardiff university.
The report, Food Distribution: An Ethical Agenda, says efficiency improvements by the UK food sector could not prevent a rise in total emissions of greenhouse gases of 3% in the year to 2005-6, because of an increase in total consumption.
The figures also do not include 12bn miles a year driven to shops in the UK, or emissions from overseas which have risen as more food is imported. The FCRN has calculated that the UK food sector produces the equivalent of 34m tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. But it takes 43m tonnes to produce everything that UK consumers eat and drink; both figures equate to just under one fifth of all UK emissions by production and consumption respectively.
The report comes as the IGD, which represents the food industry, published figures yesterday showing members from 37 companies cut the distance travelled by their lorries by 53m miles, or 4.2%.
The Food Ethics Council report recommends a new "vision" for the industry, including retailers not building stores where they will generate more traffic, parking charges and free public transport to large sites, and more "choice editing" of what shops sell.
Examples could include promoting fruit and vegetables instead of higher-carbon meat and dairy products, selling less "squidgy veg" in winter, and using recipes and other advertising to encourage customers to buy produce that was in season.
"This is already happening because supermarkets make choices about what to put on their shelves," said Steedman.
Longer-term, stores could have to stop selling the most damaging products altogether, said MacMillan, the council's executive director: "The question is how we get there: do we get there in a nice way or as it gets too expensive?"
However, the report urges retailers not to abandon developing world suppliers when they axe air-freighted fresh produce, and work with them to develop alternative long-life products such as chocolate and dried and canned fruit, which could be imported by ship or rail.
These products would also benefit local economies because more value would be added before export, said the authors. Development groups argue that imported fresh produce from the poorest countries only generate 0.2-0.3% of all UK emissions.
As well as changes by retailers, the report calls on government to include all UK consumption in its emissions reductions targets, encourage urban food production and local processing, and use public money to encourage more sustainable food and production.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/08/food.consumerpages
www.standeyo.com/NEWS/08_Food_Water/081009.cut.meat.choice.html