Food Miles
5 November 2008 at 12:46 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
My favorite economic geographer, Pierre Desrochers, has written (along with his better half, Hiroko Shimizu), a critique of the “food-miles” approach to measuring environmental impact.
As modern food production and distribution becomes ever more complex and globalized, a “buy local” food movement has arisen. This movement argues that locally produced food is not only fresher and better tasting, but it is also better for the environment: Because locally produced food does not travel far to reach your table, the production and transport of the food expend less energy overall. The local food movement has even coined a term, “food miles,” to denote the distance food has traveled from production to consumption and uses the food miles concept as a major way to determine the environmental impact of a food.
This Policy Primer examines the origins and validity of the food miles concept. The evidence presented suggests that food miles are, at best, a marketing fad that frequently and severely distorts the environmental impacts of agricultural production. At worst, food miles constitute a dangerous distraction from the very real and serious issues that affect energy consumption and the environmental impact of modern food production and the affordability of food.
See also these comments from Peter Gordon.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Food and Agriculture.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
david | 5 November 2008 at 3:46 pm
“it’s not the miles, it’s the meat”
They cite Chris Weber and Scott Matthews for the US story, and those guys are using an Input-Output model to do some interesting work on environmental impacts of international trade flows. Their paper in ES&T is readable and provides a nice nuts and bolts of how these sort of estimates can be done correctly, but also the qualifications that have to be made in terms of both data quality and the nature of the IO model itself.