A local tale

Offering regional and seasonal food can mean going that extra mile. But some supermarkets and producers are working to build a food economy that makes sense.

How can it cost over £9 billion a year just to bring us our food? This frighteningly high figure is the environmental, social and economic cost of transporting food from its place of origin to UK consumers, as calculated in Defra’s 2005 food miles study. It’s even scarier when you set it alongside the value of the agriculture, food and drink manufacturing sectors added together (£26.2 billion), as the government did, and realise that it’s more than a third.

Clearly, there’s a problem – an annual problem of almost 20 billion vehicle miles a year, to be blunt, contributing 1.8% of the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2002, not to mention the impact of local pollution, noise, congestion and accidents.

It’s a complex problem, of course. As Callton Young at the Food and Drink Federation points out, Defra’s study shows that the vast majority (87%) of the environmental and social costs of food transport arise in the UK – and that almost half of this arises from consumers travelling to and from the shops. Conversely, importing food only accounts for 13% of the total costs, and air freight only for less than half of 1% – a surprisingly small figure, given that it is more often than not placed at the heart of the ‘food miles’ debate. Young’s point is that we need a balanced discussion, based upon the evidence and embracing all three pillars of sustainability – economic, social and environmental.

Moving to the local perspective, however, there are encouraging practical signs of retailers and small-scale producers meeting half way to build a local food chain that makes obvious sense.

“You can’t get any more local than this,” says Tesco’s Jo Keohane, holding up one of the store’s ‘Local Choice’ milk cartons. “The idea is that milk is collected and sold in an area to support local suppliers,” she says. The retail giant is working in partnership with Dairy Farmers of Britain, a co-operative owned and run by farmers, to offer ‘local milk’ to customers in 600 English and Welsh stores. Keohane says sales of the branded products are high – perhaps because of the feel-good factor of knowing that the eight-pence premium (on a four-pint carton) goes to the farmers.

Yet even working with 2,600 individual farms, ten regional processing sites and 60 distribution depots across the UK, the supermarket chain is still coming up against the challenge of providing really local food. In Amersham, for example, Local Choice milk comes from farms up to 100 miles away in the Midlands. That’s because Buckinghamshire’s once substantial dairy industry has largely given way to arable crops and ‘horseyculture’. Also, with such complex distribution channels, Keohane concedes that some cartons of milk might end up travelling a long way.

In practice, the typical ‘within 30 miles’ policy adopted by supermarkets for ‘local food’ is often hard to apply because food is simply not produced uniformly across the UK. It’s these variations that lead Mike Barry, head of corporate social responsibility at Marks & Spencer, to believe that localising food can be a disadvantage in some cases: “A lot of our farmers want to grow their businesses. If there were not adequate stores and customers local to them, they couldn’t do that.”

That’s partly why M&S is focusing on stocking British, as opposed to local, food. He explains that this is what customers want: “They’ve told us that they are interested in food on a regional scale, on a regular basis. Something highly seasonal, that is in store for only two weeks, washes right by them. So we aim to buy meat from Wales for stores in Wales, fruit and veg’ from Ireland for Ireland… When you can do something on a meaningful scale, you can reduce the distance that food travels in a meaningful way.”

That’s not to say it’s always straightforward. Supporting UK producers “does require flexible arrangements” says Nick Monger-Godfrey from Waitrose, which sources 89% of eight food staples from within Britain, including beef, chicken, apples and potatoes. For example, the retailer has pledged to take hail-damaged apples from British orchards at a fair price following growers’ crops being badly affected by this summer’s poor weather. Being flexible can also mean helping suppliers extend their seasons and increase yields – even taking risks by developing new products with them. Five years ago the company promised Harry Hall to take his first crop of blueberries, and it has reaped the rewards this summer by being able to offer the first of these fruits commercially cultivated on a large scale in the UK.

But is it worth all this hard work, when calculating food miles is such a thorny issue? While Defra’s study revealed the vast distances our food travels, it also came up with some confusing conclusions; one being that tomatoes grown in the UK can result in 2,394kg of CO2 per tonne, compared to just 630kg per tonne for those grown in Spain. Critics of the research, however, point out that these figures could have looked very different if the British tomatoes were kept warm using biomass power, say, and fertilised using waste CO2 [see Greening the glasshouses case study].

Perhaps the moral of the tale lies in its title - The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development. There’s a much bigger story lurking behind those ‘food miles’ – one that’s rich with details on how the raw ingredients were sown, ploughed, harvested or reared, as well as the real-life social and economic benefits for the local producers – in both the UK and our trading partners, many of which are developing countries.

Mix ‘n’ matchMichael Bourne sells his asparagus directly to the local market. That way he gets a retail price for it, rather than a lower wholesale price. His 200-acre New Park Farm in Kent was uneconomic as a cereal farm, so, he explains, “We had to get big, get out or diversify. We diversified. We planted asparagus because it’s high value, and included soft fruits to extend the season.” The farm produces 20 tonnes of asparagus which is sold, in season, through the farm shop and others in the south, and the surplus goes to the wholesale market.

“I think there’s more room for this kind of business in the market. More and more people want to know where their food is coming from. They value the fact that it’s really fresh.”

Teamwork Tenants of the Duchy of Cornwall, Sue and Frank Martin, have joined with half a dozen other farmers to retail beef, lamb and poultry direct to the public through ‘Meat Dartmoor’.

“By working together with other farmers, we get a priority slot at the abattoir rather than having to wait two or three months,” explains Sue Martin. The group also spreads the workload, taking turns going to a farmers’ market. Selling locally is also particularly helpful in an industry where conformity is everything. Butchers and wholesalers demand that joints comply with certain standards. With the traditional Devon cattle and Cheviot and Dartmoor sheep grazed on the moor, you can’t do that for every joint. Selling locally means dealing directly with customers who are interested in the animals, the farmers and their relationship with the landscape.

From Bangkok to Britain David Lam, who farms in the Norfolk fens, has been supplying the Chinese market in Britain since 1987 with Chinese vegetables such as pak choi. Over the last five years, TV cookery shows have nurtured a wider interest in these products, and most supermarkets bring them in from as far away as Thailand – but Marks & Spencer and Waitrose are now major clients for his locally grown Cherry Farms produce.

– Trevor Lawson

11 October 2007

Trevor Lawson

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