All of us used to words "the Earth is our home". But how do we treat it? We consume a lot, but what do we give instead?
There is an article about levying special "pollution" tax on all food which travels all over the world before gets on our tables.
It's time to think and test ourselves if we are ready to change some of our habits and not have some, say, vegetables we used to have in order to help to save our home - the Earth - from global warming and don't wait when a big smart uncle do it for us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Putting pollution on grocery bills
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
ROME: Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Spanish Citrus Coast as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of the peas in Europe are grown and packaged in Kenya.
In the United States, FreshDirect.com proclaims kiwi season has expanded to "All year!" now that Italy has become the world's leading supplier of the national fruit of New Zealand, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere's winter.
Food has moved around the world since Europeans discovered tea in China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but also, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.
Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of megamarkets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe - like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco - has accelerated the trend.
But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution, especially carbon dioxide, from transporting the food.
Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmentalists and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.
"We're shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre," said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports. He noted that Britain, for example, imports - and exports - 15,000 tons of waffles, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia.
More important, Watkiss said,
"we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel."
Europe is poised to change that.
The European Commission announced this year that all freight-carrying flights into and out of Europe would be included in the European emissions trading program by 2012, meaning that permits will have to be purchased for the pollution they generate.
The commission, the EU's executive arm,
is negotiating with the global shipping organization, the International Maritime Organization,
over a tax or other plan to reduce greenhouse gases. If there is no solution by yearend, sea freight will eventually be included in the emissions trading program, too, said Barbara Helferrich, spokesman for the European Commission Environment Directorate.
"We're really ready to have everyone reduce - or pay in some way," she said.
The European Union, the world's leading food importer, has increased imports 20 percent in the last five years. The value of fresh fruit and vegetables imported by the United States, in second place, nearly doubled between 2000 and 2006.
Under a little known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry,
fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes levied on fuel for trucks, cars and buses. There is also
no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.
Proponents say
ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.
The
food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated. The debate has put some companies on the defensive, including Tesco, the largest British supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives.
Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They
oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off,
are advocating consumer education instead. Tesco, for instance, is
introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product's carbon footprint.
"This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight," said Trevor Datson, a spokesman for Tesco.
Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry northern greenhouses.
Better transportation networks have sharply reduced the time required to ship food abroad. For instance, better roads in Africa have helped cut the time it takes for goods to go from farms on that continent to stores in Europe to 4 days from 10 in recent years.
And with far cheaper labor costs in African nations, Morocco and Egypt have displaced Spain in just a few seasons as important suppliers of tomatoes and salad greens to central Europe.
"If there's an opportunity for cheaper production in terms of logistics or supply it will be taken," said Ed Moorehouse, a consultant to the food industry in London, adding that some of these shifts also create valuable jobs in the developing world.
The economics are compelling. For example, Norwegian cod costs a manufacturer about $2.99 a kilogram, or $1.36 a pound, to process in Europe, but only 50 cents a kilogram, to process in Asia.
The ability to transport food cheaply has given rise to new and booming businesses.
"In the past few years there have been new plantations all over the center of Italy," said Antonio Baglioni, export manager of Apofruit, a major Italian kiwi exporter.
Kiwis from Sanifrutta, another Italian exporter, travel by sea in refrigerated containers: 18 days to the United States, 28 to South Africa and more than a month to reach New Zealand.
Some studies have calculated that as little as 3 percent of emissions from the food sector are caused by transportation. But Watkiss, the Oxford economist, said the percentage was growing rapidly. Moreover,
imported foods generate more emissions than generally acknowledged because they require layers of packaging and, in the case of perishable food, refrigeration.
Britain, with its short growing season and powerful supermarket chains, imports 95 percent of its fruit and more than half of its vegetables. Food accounts for 25 percent of truck shipments in Britain, according to the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Datson, the Tesco spokesman, acknowledged that there were environmental consequences to the increased distances food travels, but he said his company was merely responding to consumer appetites.
"The offer and range has been growing because our customers want things like snap peas year-round," Datson said. "We don't see our job as consumer choice editing."
Global supermarket chains like Tesco and Carrefour, spreading throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, cater to a market for convenience foods, like washed lettuce and cut vegetables, as well as global brands.
Pringles potato chips, for example, are sold in more than 180 countries, though they are manufactured in only a handful of places, said Kay Puryear, a spokesman for Procter & Gamble, which makes Pringles. A Pringles plant in Tennessee, for example, ships to 80 countries, including Japan.
China, whose traditional cuisine rarely uses potatoes, is now the world's biggest potato producer.
Proponents of taxing transportation fuel say it would end such uses by changing the economic calculus.
"Food is traveling because transport has become so cheap in a world of globalization," said Frederic Hague, head of the Norwegian environmental group Bellona.
"If it was just a matter of processing fish cheaper in China, I'd be happy with it traveling there. The problem is pollution."
The European Union has led the world in proposals to incorporate environmental costs into the price consumers pay for food at the market. Switzerland, which does not belong to the EU, already taxes trucks that cross its borders.
In addition to bringing airlines under its emission-trading scheme, the European Commission is also considering a freight charge specifically tied to the environmental toll of food travel to shift the current calculus that "transporting freight is cheaper than producing goods locally."
The problem is measuring those emissions. The fact that food travels farther does not necessarily mean more energy is used. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where for example, storing apples for months would require refrigeration.
But those studies were done in New Zealand, and the food travel debate is inevitably intertwined with economic interests.
Last month, Tony Burke, the Australian minister for agriculture, fisheries and forestry, said carbon footprinting and labeling food miles - the distance food has traveled - is "nothing more than protectionism."
Shippers have vigorously fought the idea of levying a transportation fuel tax, noting that if some countries repealed those provisions of the Chicago Convention, it would wreak havoc with global trade, creating an uneven patchwork of fuel taxes.
It would also give countries that kept the exemption a huge trade advantage.Some European retailers hope that voluntary green measures like Tesco's labeling, which is set to begin this year, will slow the momentum for new taxes and regulations.
The company will begin testing the labeling system, starting with products like orange juice and laundry detergent. Customers may be surprised by what they discover.
Box Fresh Organics, a popular British brand, for example, advertises that 85 percent of its vegetables come from the British Midlands. But in winter, in its standard basket, only the potatoes and carrots are grown in Britain. The grapes are from South Africa, the fennel is from Spain and the squash is from Italy.
Retailers today could not survive if they failed to offer such variety, said Moorehouse, the British food consultant.
"Unfortunately," he said,
"we've educated our customers to expect cheap food, that they can go to the market to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. All year. 24/7."
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